Military families are ‘feeling the pinch’ with national unemployment at a record high
Millions of Americans have lost their jobs — military spouses among them. (Public Domain)
Army spouse Missy Broadhurst had been taking substitute teaching hours at her son’s Fort Knox, Kentucky, elementary school to pay off her student loans. Whether she worked two hours a week or full time, her family was relying on that income.
But since the school closed on March 13 in light of the coronavirus pandemic, Broadhurst hasn’t made a dime — not even in unemployment benefits she filed for long ago.
“We’ve had to really adjust our lifestyle to accommodate only bringing in one paycheck and having to put some of my husband’s paycheck toward those student loans. And that’s frustrating,” Broadhurst said.
Broadhurst shared her experience on The Spouse Angle podcast on Wednesday, putting a military face on the disheartening unemployment figures we’re hearing from the federal government.
The national unemployment rate rose to 14.7 percent in April, up from 4.4 percent in March, according to May Department of Labor data. That’s the largest spike in unemployment in one month on record, dating back to when the federal government first started tracking these figures in 1948.
The number of U.S. jobs fell by 20.5 million overall. Some of the hardest-hit industries were hospitality, leisure, education and health services.
“Unemployment for military spouses and underemployment is kind of a crisis in the best of times,” said Kathy Roth-Douquet, CEO of Blue Star Families and the other podcast episode guest. “So you add a pandemic to a crisis and it’s not good. And we’re seeing that.”
Kathy Roth-Douquet, left, and Missy Broadhurst, right, were guests on episode 29 of The Spouse Angle podcast.
Blue Star Families has been conducting a weekly “Pain Points Poll” for the past several weeks, asking members of the military community to weigh in on the issues most affecting them during this pandemic. Employment is one of the major ones.
In the best of times, spouses have an unemployment rate of 24 percent, Roth-Douquet said: “Now, it’s compounded enormously.”
And those are just the spouses who show up in unemployment data, meaning they are actively looking for work.
In podcast episode 24 Army spouse Rachel Warner told listeners she was supposed to move with a permanent change of station before the military’s stop movement order came out. She already had quit her job before she found out she actually was staying put for the foreseeable future.
“Families are feeling the pinch” — especially the younger ones, said Roth-Douquet, who is also the spouse of a retired Marine. “Your 22-year-old military spouse, wife of a sergeant, is more likely to be employed in the hospitality business, in restaurants, in retail, and most of those are really hard hit. So those families who had the least money to begin with are higher hit for losing jobs and have fewer savings, so that’s something that we really need to pay attention to.”
There is help available from the service relief agencies such as Army Emergency Relief, Air Force Aid Society and Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, Roth-Douquet said. And for military spouses seeking work, she recommends checking out a growing number of remote work opportunities, which tend to pair well with a mobile military lifestyle.
Broadhurst said she may go back into her original field of human resources when this is all over, especially with school openings in the fall still uncertain. But for now, she’s trying to focus on the positive.
“We’re fortunate that my husband is active-duty military, so we know we’re going to get our house is going to be paid for that we have a roof over our head and we don’t have to give it up because we can’t pay for it, we know that we still have health care,” she said. “We are fortunate being military families, and I’m trying to remember that.”