Serving Abroad, Fighting at Home: How SCRA and USERRA Protect Your Job and Your Money
When you serve, the law is supposed to have your back. If a bank, landlord, employer, or lender treats your orders like an inconvenience instead of honoring your rights, statutes like the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA), South Carolina’s Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) can give you real leverage.
Who These Laws Protect
USERRA protects people who leave civilian jobs to serve in the uniformed services and then want to return to work. That covers active-duty service, Reserve duty, and many National Guard activations.
The federal SCRA protects active-duty servicemembers—and in many cases, their spouses and dependents—by limiting certain civil, financial, and contractual obligations during military service. South Carolina’s version expands and supplements the federal SCRA and makes a federal SCRA violation a violation of state law here as well.
Your Job: USERRA
USERRA is built on a simple rule: your civilian job shouldn’t be the price of your military service.
Among other things, your employer generally must:
- Reemploy you promptly in the job you would have had if you’d never left (the “escalator” position), with the same seniority, status, and pay, once you return and meet the statute’s timing and notice rules.
- Avoid discrimination based on your past, present, or future military service, including refusing to hire you, firing you, demoting you, or denying benefits because of your obligations.
- Protect certain benefits while you’re gone and restore health coverage and pension benefits when you return, depending on how long you were away.
When employers refuse to rehire you, downgrade your position, or punish you for drills or deployments, you may have a USERRA claim. Remedies can include getting your job back, back pay and benefits, and in willful cases, “liquidated” (double) damages plus attorneys’ fees.
Your Money and Home: SCRA and South Carolina SCRA
If USERRA is about your job, SCRA is about your financial life—loans, leases, housing, and civil lawsuits. You shouldn’t lose your house, car, or financial footing because you answered the call to serve.
Key protections include:
- 6% interest rate cap: Certain pre-service debts (like credit cards, car loans, some student loans, and mortgages taken out before active duty) must be reduced to a maximum of 6% interest during qualifying service if you provide proper notice.
- Default judgment protections: Before a court can enter a default judgment against a servicemember who hasn’t appeared in a civil case, it must follow specific procedures and, in many situations, stay (pause) the case.
- Stays of civil cases: Courts can stay civil lawsuits and some administrative proceedings when your service materially affects your ability to appear.
- Housing and foreclosure protections: The SCRA limits certain evictions of servicemembers and dependents and restricts foreclosures and some mortgage actions without a court order that factors in your military service.
- Lease and contract termination rights: In many situations, you can terminate residential leases, vehicle leases, and some other contracts when you receive qualifying orders, without early termination penalties.
South Carolina’s SCRA extends some protections to National Guard members on qualifying state active duty and expressly covers dependents. It allows servicemembers, dependents, or the Attorney General to bring civil actions for intentional violations and authorizes civil penalties up to a statutory cap per violation.
Common Red Flags
You should be concerned—and should probably talk to a lawyer—if any of these sound familiar:
- You come back from deployment and are told your job “no longer exists,” or you’re shunted into a lower-paying, dead-end role instead of your escalator position.
- A creditor refuses to drop your pre-service loan rate to 6% after you send your orders and written request, or quietly continues charging higher interest and fees.
- Your vehicle is repossessed, or your home is foreclosed on while you’re on covered service, without a proper court order.
- A landlord evicts you or your dependents from covered housing without a lawful court order that accounts for your SCRA or South Carolina SCRA protections.
- You’re denied the right to terminate a residential or auto lease after qualifying orders, or you’re hit with early termination penalties the law doesn’t allow.
- You discover a default judgment entered against you while you were on active duty, or you were fired, harassed, or punished at work because of drills, deployments, or your military status.
What You Can Recover
Depending on what happened and which law applies, possible remedies include:
- Reemployment in the correct position with the seniority, status, and benefits you earned.
- Back pay, lost benefits, and other financial losses.
- Corrections to contracts and loans, including interest rate reductions, reversing improper fees, and undoing wrongful repossessions, foreclosures, or evictions, plus cleaning up related credit reporting.
- Double damages or civil penalties for willful or intentional violations.
- Attorneys’ fees and costs in many cases.
About the Authors and How to Reach Us
Dave Maxfield, a consumer protection attorney whose practice includes representing servicemembers and their families in cases against banks, lenders, credit reporting agencies, and other businesses. You can reach Dave at ConsumerLawSC.com.
Allison Sullivan is a partner with Bluestein Attorneys, whose practice focuses on workers’ compensation, personal injury, and mediation, and whose firm represents veterans in Veterans’ Disability and Social Security cases, as well as other matters. You can reach Allison at BluesteinAttorneys.com.
