Wednesday, October 30, 2002

A story published today by the Asbury Park Press report that Eileen Appelbaum, director for the Center for Women and Work and co-president of the Washington-based Center for Designing Work Wisely, has suggested that offering domestic partner benefits is a matter of "equity and fairness."

Applebaum made the comments during  panel discussion entitled  "Domestic Partner Benefits: Theories and Practice" held yesterday at Rutgers University.

Today's workplace is different. Companies can't expect teamwork and cooperation while treating employees differently, said Appelbaum, who moderated the panel discussion.

Domestic partner benefits are comparable to those for married couples, providing gay and lesbian partners with health, life insurance and pensions, among other types of benefits.

Gov. McGreevey supports a recently introduced bill, sponsored by Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg, D-Bergen, to make such benefits available to same-sex couples.

In June, Ford, General Motors and the Chrysler division of DaimlerChrysler took steps to provide health benefits to domestic partners of its employees.

Universities including Harvard, Yale and the City University of New York offer such benefits, Appelbaum said.

Panelist, M.V. Lee Badgett, associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and co-founder of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, displayed a graph that showed steady growth among employers offering domestic partner benefits between the 1980s and 1990s. She said the spurt through the years says a lot about the gay and lesbian movement.

Companies who have not extended the benefits already in place for spouses to same-sex couples are "in fact treating people differently because of their sexual orientation and marital status," she said. "It's not like we have a lot of money to pay for insurance on our own."

Offering the benefits doesn't translate to higher health insurance costs, said fellow panelist Desma Holcomb, treasurer for Pride at Work NY and deputy director of research and policy for Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ.

Holcomb pointed to union bargaining at the New York-based Village Voice newspaper and in Berkeley, Calif., where, during the early 1980s, union representatives were able to include domestic partner benefits as part of an employee package.