The Disabled Veteran in State and Local Government

Abstract

AMERICAN state and local governments today employ 1,862,000 persons.1 In peacetime this group constitutes 64 per cent of the American public service.2 A discussion of the disabled veteran in state and local government is, therefore, a matter which concerns the personnel practice of one of the Nation's largest employers. While such practice would be significant if only because of the magnitude of state and local government, it is particularly significant because it reflects the extent to which public practice corresponds with public policy as imposed upon private employers. In an effort to assay the facts of present practice, the author has surveyed 37 state, municipal, and county jurisdictions. The 37 collectively employ 558,783 employees or 29 per cent of the total state, municipal, and county services. In addition, certain other conclusions in the following text are drawn from a survey completed some months ago, affecting the veterans' group as a whole.3 The latter survey included 18 states, 7 counties, 18 cities, 1 ad hoc district, and the Federal Government. Aggregate employees in the 45 jurisdictions included in that survey exceed three and one-half million. Attention must be called to the difficulty of generalizing about the personnel practices-whether for able or disabled veterans--of as diverse a group as American state and local jurisdictions. In the first place, township practice is almost impossible to ascertain. Uniformity of practice in those governmental units is almost nonexistent. There are no central personnel agencies to which one may turn for information regarding such practices as have been standardized. For purposes of this discussion the township employees must be eliminated. There is similar difficulty in determining present practice in many municipal and county jurisdictions in which there is no central personnel office and no attempt to standardize disabled veteran practice. To a certain extent this is also true of the twenty-eight states which have no civil service systems today. In all of these jurisdictions with noncentralized personnel practices disabled veteran programs are dictated by individual departmental policy as modified by such legislation as may exist on the subject. It therefore seems necessary to qualify the conclusions set forth in the following paragraphs by saying that, for the most part, they represent practice in those state and local jurisdictions which have centralized and uniform personnel systems. It is reasonable to conclude that the latter represent the most progressive among the jurisdictions on these levels. Practices in other governmental units may be assumed to be even less satisfactory than those described below.