Missouri Private Employer Preference and Veteran Employment Priority

Two sections handle employment outside the merit system, and one of them has more teeth than the state preference does. Section 285.250 is the private side. A private, nonpublic employer may grant preference to a veteran in hiring and promoting employees, and may grant preference to the spouse of a disabled veteran who has a service-connected permanent and total disability or to the surviving spouse of a deceased veteran. "Disabled veteran" in the spouse subsection means a person with a compensable service-connected disability adjudicated by VA or by a service retirement board. Subsection 3 is the point of the section: granting preference under subsections 1 and 2 shall not violate any state equal employment opportunity law. Note the word. Missouri's safe harbour is narrower than the equivalent in some states, which extend it to local ordinances as well, and it says nothing about federal law. An employer in a Missouri municipality with its own fair employment ordinance, or one worried about federal disparate impact exposure, has not been given an answer by this section. The section compels nothing. It creates no right a veteran can enforce against a private employer; it removes a reason for the employer to say no. Section 285.237 is the public training side and it is mandatory. Any federally funded employment and training programme administered by any state agency must include a veteran priority system, and each state agency must refer qualified applicants to job openings and training opportunities in the following order: special disabled veterans; target-specific veterans; all other veterans; other eligible persons; nonveterans. That is an explicit five-tier ordering with disabled veterans at the top, which is a stronger instrument than the tie-breaker in section 36.220 that governs the state's own hiring. Subsection 4 lists specific duties: ensure veterans are treated with courtesy and respect at all state governmental facilities; give priority in referral to jobs and in enrollment in training programmes to qualified veterans and other eligible persons; give preferential treatment to special disabled veterans in the provision of all needed state services; and provide information and effective referral assistance regarding benefits and services available through other agencies. Subsection 3 requires each such agency to submit an annual report to the speaker of the house, the president pro tem of the senate and the chairman of the Missouri Veterans' Commission on the services it provides, reporting separately on all entitlement programmes and employment or training programmes for each of the five classes, with veterans as a separate reporting module. That reporting obligation is the only real enforcement mechanism in the section, and a veteran denied priority has no private remedy under it. Section 42.017 adds an outreach duty on the commission itself. The commission must actively seek out, within every county and within any city not within a county, business organisations that have available job opportunities and are interested in hiring veterans, collect their contact information, and prominently display it in a table on the commission's website arranged by county and by city not within a county.