If a person is called away from his/her job to serve the armed services, is there a law that says that his/her employer must hold that exact job for that person (or a job of equal pay)?
The Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment Rights Act generally does just that. You can get more details here:
As has already been said, USERRA protects your job while you’re gone, with a few big, important caveats:
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If you are told to sign something as you leave, read it. If it’s something saying you’re not coming back to the job after your term of service is up, when you come back you will have no recourse. People get burned by this one more often than you might expect. They don’t read it because their employer tells them it’s just HR stuff or something, and they come back to find out they’re screwed.
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NEVER intimate that you’re thinking about quitting. The business can run with that and you will have a hell of a fight if they insist that you said you were quitting.
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There are specific windows on reporting back to your employer when your time of service is up. Do NOT exceed them or the business can send you packing.
Businesses are not as supportive of people in the Reserves/Guard as they used to be. This war has been going on so long that they’re getting weary of people coming and going. I can’t prove it, mainly because there’s nothing I can find on the Internet about it (it might just be bad search terms), but anecdotally it’s harder to get hired if you’re a Guard/Reserve member nowadays precisely because you’re subject to leaving for up to a year.
But if they do hire you, follow the rules to the letter and protect yourself and your job. USERRA has teeth, but only if you can prove that you did everything right.
Thank you for the responses. When you return, do they have to give you the exact job you had (or one of equal pay)?