Originally Posted by
Lewbronski
Yes, there is legal protection. The law is called USERRA. So if they were going to retaliate, they can’t directly tie it to taking too much military leave or anything like that. It’s kind of like with whistleblowers. The law protects them. A company can’t directly target a whistleblower for their whistleblowing but...
Don’t know how they treat it currently, but in the past there were (and maybe still are) chief pilots who frowned upon and covertly discouraged taking “too much” military leave. That said, any company has to be very careful if they try to retaliate against guys taking mil leave.
At the beginning of all the covid nonsense, my unit had a lot of missions drop for transporting medical folks up to the NY area to standup the ad hoc Hospitals. We got slammed with requests and ran out of full timer crew availability fast. Our boss started asking for help. I called my chief pilot 3 days before a trip and explained the situation. I hate dropping ML less than 2 weeks out. He cut me off and said “Thanks for what you’re doing, don’t think another thing about it, we’ve got it covered here, be safe and we’ll be here when you’re done with these missions”.