Domestic Partner Benefits on the March

By: Randy Dotinga The list of media organizations offering domestic partner benefits is growing so rapidly that advocates are running out of companies to target.

"We're trying to figure out where to go next," said the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association's Ross Sneyd, an Associated Press statehouse reporter in Vermont whose own employer just indicated its willingness to join the list.

The AP seems likely to join other recent converts to domestic partner benefits, including Gannett Co. Inc., E.W. Scripps Co. and Belo.

According to a 2002 survey by the Mercer consulting firm, same-sex domestic partner benefits were offered by 19% of employers with more than 500 employees. No figures exist about the rate in the newspaper publishing industry, but more than a dozen top chains offer the benefits at all or most of their print properties.

The chains include Advance Publications Inc., Cox Newspapers, Dow Jones & Co., Hearst Corp., Knight Ridder, McClatchy Co., The New York Times Co., Pulitzer Inc., Tribune Co., and The Washington Post Co., plus those mentioned above, according to NLGJA, the journalist association. Several independently owned newspapers also offer the benefits.

It's quite a sea change since 1982, when The Village Voice, an alternative weekly in New York City, became the first newspaper in the country to provide health insurance to partners of gay employees.

NLGJA, which didn't even exist until 1990, has recently been targeting three holdouts -- the AP, MediaNews Group Inc., and NBC. The AP, however, agreed this week to add domestic partnership benefits to the contract offer it is sending to employees. "We were led to believe it probably wouldn't happen this year. The turnaround was very welcome news," Sneyd said. (AP spokesman Jack Stokes said he couldn't talk about the offer because it's still part of negotiations.)

MediaNews -- whose properties include The Denver Post and the (Los Angeles) Daily News -- may drop off the target list in the next year or two. The chain is considering the benefits as part of an overall review of its health insurance offerings for its 9,000 employees, said Charles Kamen, vice president of human resources. But it may take 6-18 months to add the benefits if they are approved, he said.

Elsewhere, the Copley Press, owner of The San Diego Union-Tribune and other papers, has discussed the benefits before but hasn't chosen to offer them to its 4,000 employees, said Vice President Hal Fuson. But he added that the chain already has strong benefits, including both a pension plan and a 401(k) with company match.

Lee Enterprises Inc. (whose properties include California's North County Times), Freedom Communications Inc. (The Orange County Register), and Media General Inc. (The Tampa Tribune) don't offer the benefits and have no current plans to do so, spokespersons said. The chains have 6,700, 7,500, and 7,600 employees, respectively, placing them among the largest newspaper companies without the benefits.

"There has not been much interest raised. It comes up so seldom in our communities," said Lee Enterprises spokesman Dan Hayes. Many of the chain's newspapers are in suburbs and rural areas.

Acceptance of domestic partner benefits does vary by region, said John Small, manager of health and benefits services in the western U.S. for the Towers Perrin consulting firm. However, a full one-fourth of 700 companies monitored by Tower Perrin offer the benefits, Small said, and the tide is turning toward offering them to unmarried heterosexual couples as well as gay couples. "Once something moves from leading edge to standard practice, people get more comfortable," he said.

Corporate officials once worried about potentially high costs from domestic partner benefits, especially for the treatment of AIDS. Linda Cearley, a California field representative for the Newspaper Guild union, remembers sitting in a negotiation meeting where a newspaper official worried aloud that the benefits would boost premiums across the board. The official was clearly referring to AIDS, she said. That paper, which Cearley didn't name, still doesn't offer the benefits.

In fact, a Towers Perrin analysis showed that the costs of offering the benefits are minimal, Small said. One reason is that few employees sign up for them in most cases. Several media companies reported to NLGJA that fewer than 1% of their employees took advantage of the offerings.

"In a lot of domestic partner situations, both people work and have their own benefits," Small said. Also, federal law requires employees to pay taxes on the benefits provided to their unmarried partners.

The number of employees who sign up for the benefits isn't the main reason to offer the benefits, said Pete CaJacob, vice president of human resources for McClatchy, which offers benefits to homosexual and unmarried heterosexual couples at all but one of its newspapers. "It's important to us," he said, "because it reinforces what we believe is our strong commitment to diversity."

(Editor's note: Dotinga is a member of NLGJA and freelances for a Lee Enterprises newspaper.)