Nebraska Private Employer Veterans Preference

Section 48-238 does for private employment what 48-226 does for public employment, with one important difference: it is voluntary. A private employer may adopt a voluntary veterans preference employment policy, meaning a preference for hiring and promoting a preference eligible over another equally qualified applicant or employee. The policy must be in writing and must be applied uniformly to decisions regarding hiring and promotion. Private employer is defined to include a sole proprietorship, corporation, partnership, association, limited liability company or any other entity with one or more employees. There is no size floor. A two-person business can adopt one. Subsection (5) is the provision that makes the section work. A voluntary veterans preference employment policy shall not be considered a violation of any state or local equal employment opportunity law, including the Nebraska Fair Employment Practice Act. Without that shelter an employer preferring veterans would be exposed to a claim from a non-veteran applicant, and in practice most employers would not risk it. This is the same design that several other states in this catalog use, and it is the reason these statutes exist at all. Who counts is copied from the public preference. A veteran is a person who served full-time duty with military pay and allowances, except for training or physical fitness determination, with an honorable or general under honorable conditions discharge; or the spouse of a veteran who has a one hundred percent permanent VA disability rating, or who was killed in the line of duty or died due to military service. Preference eligible adds the spouse of a servicemember for the period of active status plus one hundred eighty days. The documents a veteran must give the employer are listed in subsection (3), and the list includes one form that appears nowhere else in this file: a spouse claiming on a line of duty death may produce a Department of Defense Form 1300, the report of casualty, as an alternative to other documentation. Subsection (4) requires an employer that implements a policy to notify the Commissioner of Labor, who maintains a registry of the private employers in Nebraska that have one. That registry is the useful part for a job seeker. An employer on it has decided in advance, in writing, to prefer a veteran among equally qualified candidates, and a veteran who knows which employers those are can direct applications accordingly. A veteran should ask the Department of Labor for the registry rather than guessing. What the section does not do. It creates no right for a veteran against an employer that has no policy, and no remedy against an employer with a policy that does not follow it. The obligation to apply the policy uniformly is a condition of the shelter in subsection (5) rather than a duty owed to any applicant.