Veterans: Beware the Plans Being Laid for You
New York City construction unions value the experience and contributions of America's returning service men and women, and make efforts to help veterans assimilate and find jobs. But the plans outlined by Project 2025, written by the people who oppose unions, portend a much more harmful treatment of American veterans.
You can tell a lot about an organization by the positions it takes on our veterans of the armed services. After all, the freedoms we enjoy in this country have been defended life-and-limb by our service men and women and we owe them our best efforts to make their lives comfortable while they serve and afterward.
Construction unions offer a helping hand to vets, as we’ll detail in this essay. But the people who normally sit on the opposite side of the bargaining table from unions — the wealthy business management class — have had their minions author the leadership manifesto entitled “Project 2025,” which could become our nation’s playbook. In their outline we see how this entitled and powerful group intends to treat our veterans. It is not with respect.
Unions Lift Vets
Our New York City construction unions recognize their responsibility to veterans and they support them in a number of ways. Key among that support are civilian-reintegration programs like Helmets to Hardhats (H2H) and the Union Veterans Council (UVC) which provide a pathway from military service into the American workforce, specifically into a unionized position in the construction industry.
The transition from service to civilian life, it has been documented, can be difficult as many vets carry some emotional and physical baggage that can interfere with a fluid re-integration. H2H and UVC help returning service members get started with earn-while-you-learn apprenticeship programs in construction trades. They also help apprenticed vets find their way into appropriate construction unions where they can flourish.
Such partnerships build the workforce and literally build our cities. Jose Montes, a vet who went through H2H to become a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Local 222, said that “The brotherhood from the military is the same in the union. Helmets to Hardhats helped me get into my local with ease, and I am forever thankful.”
The impact of joining a construction union goes beyond a paycheck for veterans. It offers them a community, a sense of purpose, and a collective identity that many veterans miss after leaving the service. Megan Osterdock, an army veteran who is now in the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 150, said these programs simply “help Veterans build better lives.”
Construction unions build up American veterans. The plans inside Project 2025 are a wrecking ball.
Project 2025 to Vets: “Thank you for your service – NOT”
That’s unions. Then there’s the other side: The wealthy management class in this country. They normally claim a deep loyalty to veterans. But a closer look at Project 2025 reveals an unprecedented attack on veterans and US Veterans Administration.
The below excerpt borrows from a piece written by US Representative from Pennsylvania’s 17th District, Chris DeLuzio, a veteran who served our navy from 2006 – 2012. The essay was published in Military.com, the leading news and information website for U.S. service members, veterans and their families.
Let’s start here (there’s so much to cover): Project 2025 would make significant reductions to veterans' health care services and disability benefits. Its proposed changes will disenroll millions of veterans from VA-paid health care. Other veterans could lose access to VA health care for issues that "don't align" with their service-related conditions.
Project 2025's plan would also require VA hospitals to "increase the number of patients seen each day to equal the number seen by Department of Defense (DoD) medical facilities." That directive ignores the enormous differences in needs between generally healthy younger service members and older veterans, and risks compromising the quality of care for veterans.
Slashing funds for Veteran Care and Facilities
Project 2025 also calls for VA hospitals to outsource more care into costly private facilities, a fiscally reckless move that has already ballooned costs for the VA. Project 2025 also endorses the revival of a scuttled commission that aimed to downsize and even close VA hospitals. The ultimate endgame of these plans is to dismantle the VA's clinical care mission. This goal should send shivers down the spines of America's veterans and those who want them to have the best care out there.
And it gets even worse. Project 2025 is hell-bent on cutting veterans' hard-earned disability benefits. The agenda calls for cutting costs by revising disability rating awards for future claims and partially revising some existing claims. Let's call this what this is: a proposal to slash care and benefits for disabled veterans, in part or in whole. In a Project 2025 world, future generations of disabled veterans could see their benefits cut or wiped out entirely.
Unions Build; Project 2025 is a Wrecking Ball
Veterans are sick of being used as political props, welcomed in campaign ads and press conferences, but then having their needs ignored by people more interested in increasing their own wealth and power. Unions have delivered tangible results for veterans: reintegration, union membership, a living wage, benefits, belonging. But the plans outlined in Project 2025, if allowed to be put to action, would do frightful harm to these people who deserve our respect, not our disdain.
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