Charities Review Military-Leave Policies as Reservists Are Deployed

By Debra E. Blum

Frank Moser was working as a district executive for the Boy Scouts of America, recruiting and training adult volunteers in eastern

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South Dakota, when his Army National Guard unit was called to active duty. He was sent to a military base in New Jersey, then shipped out to Baghdad, where he served for nearly a year training local police officers.

When Mr. Moser returned home at the end of last year, he called the Boy Scouts to see if he could get his old job back. It was taken, but the Boy Scouts offered Mr. Moser a similar position in another South Dakota region. After some initial disappointment, Mr. Moser took the new post, and last month, he and his wife moved about 150 miles to Pierre, S.D.

"I had expected, probably unrealistically, I'd step back into the same job and the same routine," says Mr. Moser, a member of the Minnesota Army National Guard since 2001.

He says that while he was always confident the Boy Scouts would take him back, it took some time to understand that the organization had changed a bit while he was gone.

Mr. Moser is just one of the tens of thousands of reservists and Guard members who have been called to active duty in recent years. Not since World War II has the United States military made such heavy use of its part-time soldiers — in the Army Guard alone, roughly 240,000 of its 334,000 members have been deployed since October 2001 — and many American employers, including nonprofit organizations, have felt the impact.

Holding Jobs Open

Federal law ensures that employees called to military duty for a stretch of less than five years have a right to their jobs back, or positions with comparable seniority, status, and pay.

Returning soldiers are entitled to the same pension benefits they would get if they had never been away, and they must be accommodated, within limits, if they are disabled or require extra training to get back up to speed.

While employers must abide by these and other laws governing employment rights and military leave, not everything is prescribed. Among the issues left up to individual employers, for example, is whether to continue an employee's salary during leave.

Many nonprofit organizations handle military leaves on a case-by-case basis, in most instances because so few employees, if any, are reservists. But labor lawyers who work with nonprofit groups say that some charities have dusted off their military-leave policies in recent years, or put new ones in place as more and more reservists at their organizations or elsewhere have been called to duty.

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a handful of nurses and laboratory workers at Saints Memorial Medical Center, a nonprofit hospital in Lowell, Mass., were called to active duty — the first time employees at the hospital had been deployed.

The hospital's chief executive officer at the time, a former corpsman in the Navy, immediately instituted a policy to pay the reservists the difference between their military salary and what their hospital salary had been. The hospital currently has 10 reservists on staff, none of them deployed.

United Way of America did not have a policy in place about paying reservists during leave, but it decided to make a special effort to help avert a financial crisis for an employee called into service in 2003.

Carlos E. Gomez was working as a director of business operations at the United Way's national office, in Alexandria, Va., when he got called to a full-time post as part of the Navy Reserves. His duties involved overseeing the shipment of medical supplies to hospital ships sent abroad. Mr. Gomez could commute to his active-duty job from his home in Virginia, but he couldn't afford to pay the home's mortgage on his reservist's salary, which was 65 percent less than what he earned at the United Way.

Upon his request, the United Way agreed to pay the difference in the two salaries for up to one year. Mr. Gomez stayed in close touch with his co-workers via phone and e-mail during what turned out to be a six-month deployment, and he often went into the office on weekends to check up on the budgets, invoices, and payments he had been responsible for at United Way. In addition, Mr. Gomez says, his colleagues "rearranged and shifted" responsibilities and duties to cover his absence.

"The decision to match the salary did not come with conditions, but I love this organization and the things they do, and what they did for me was above and beyond," Mr. Gomez says. "I felt compelled to do the best I could for them. Besides, I knew I'd come back to my job and I wanted everything to be in order."

Richard A. Reid, a member of the South Dakota Air National Guard, cut short his post-deployment vacation time to make sure things were in order for his return to work as an assistant dean of engineering at South Dakota State University. After a four-month stint helping to build air bases in Iraq, he took a briefer than usual military-service rest period to get back on campus before the start of the fall semester in 2003.

"The military and the school would have given me another month off, but I wanted to get back when the students were returning," Mr. Reid says.

During his absence, another professor finished the last six lectures of the engineering course Mr. Reid had been teaching, and a former assistant dean who had retired was brought back to work part time in the engineering school. Since Mr. Reid had also been serving as the acting head of the civil-engineering department, the institution named someone else in his place. By the time Mr. Reid returned, a new department head had been hired, and Mr. Reid was able to slip back into his roles as a professor and an assistant dean.

Career Change

Despite such arrangements to hold open jobs, not all reservists called up to active duty go back to their employers.

Laddy (Tammy) Duckworth, a helicopter pilot with the Illinois Army National Guard, left her job at Rotary International in 2004, when she was called to serve in Iraq. She was severely injured when the helicopter she was flying over Baghdad was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. Ms. Duckworth, who now walks with prosthetic legs, spent months undergoing rehabilitation, all the while planning, she said at the time, to return to her job as manager of Rotary's Asia Pacific department.

But Ms. Duckworth, who testified before a Senate panel about the concerns of troops wounded in Iraq, decided instead on a new career path: She is a Democratic candidate for the Sixth Congressional District of Illinois.

The charity was able to hire the person who had been filling in for Ms. Duckworth on a temporary basis.

"It was difficult to replace her," says Carolyn Engblom, Rotary's manager of human resources. "But we wish Tammy all the best."