George Juelch was in Baghdad, about to embark on a hazardous eight-hour road trip to Mosul, when he got a disturbing phone call from his wife in Pismo Beach.
She told him she had just opened a letter from the California Military Department. The department runs the National Guard and had hired Juelch as a cook at Camp San Luis Obispo before he was mobilized for Iraq duty.
The Guard was writing Juelch to tell him it was shutting down the dining facility at the camp, and would no longer need his services. In other words, he was being laid off.
That was in April 2006. Last month, Juelch won an $82,000 settlement from his old employer after he filed suit against the Guard for violating a federal law that requires employers to preserve the jobs of mobilized troops.
"At first, I didn't believe it," Juelch said of the 2006 call from his wife. "I thought they could not do that to you, there must be a mistake. You would think the Military Department would be the ones to protect you from things like that."
Guard spokesman Jon Siepmann said the state settled Juelch's suit to avoid the costs and risks of litigation, and did not admit wrongdoing.
But Juelch's lawyer says it's obvious that the Guard screwed up.
"Someone's at war, you don't fire them, you don't lay them off," Kris Thompson said. "C'mon. Especially an organization that has so many places to put him."
Juelch, 42, signed on with the state in 2001 as a cook at Camp San Luis Obispo. Later, he was promoted to food service sergeant.
He was called up for federal National Guard duty from 2003 to 2005 but didn't leave the country. In May 2005, he was called up again and sent to Iraq, where he trained Iraqi police officers, helping them procure equipment from bullets to gas.
A 1994 federal law requires employers to keep jobs open or make a similar one available, unless the employer has gone through changes that make reemployment unreasonable or pose an undue hardship.
The Department of Labor reviewed 1,357 complaints made under the federal law in the 2006 fiscal year. Even federal government employers had trouble complying with the law, apparently unaware that they had to seek help for workers too injured to return to their former jobs, according to a Department of Labor report to Congress this year.
Siepmann, the California Guard spokesman, said Juelch is the first person to file a lawsuit under the federal law.
Thompson praised the Guard for realizing early in the litigation it had made a mistake.
"When someone comes home, we should lay out the red carpet him," Thompson said. "In this one case, it just didn't happen."
Juelch now works for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and still does weekend drills as a National Guardsman.
Call John Hill, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 326-5543.
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