Domestic partner benefits up

By: Editorial Staff Fortune 500 companies do it. City governments do it. And, increasingly, newspapers do it.
What they do is offer healthcare and other benefits to the unmarried partners of lesbian and gay employees. Some companies also offer benefits to straight domestic partners.
According to the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA), the number of news companies and associated unions offering such benefits has more than doubled since 1997. Today, 57 offer domestic benefits. In 1994, NLGJA could only find 10 media companies that did so.
Over 650 newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, magazines, and online news sites offer the benefits, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, and The Washington Post. NLGJA has published a directory that shows which divisions within the parent corporations offer the benefits and which don't.
The directory also outlines the costs to companies for offering the benefits (which NLGJA claims are minimal), and argues that companies should do so for competitive reasons.
"Companies that don't yet offer [domestic partner] benefits are quickly falling behind," said Sherry Boschert, a NLGJA national board member who authored the directory and a reporter for the International Medical News Group in San Francisco. "Offering these benefits is ? recognition for all gay and lesbian employees that they are fully and equally valued in their workplaces."
The directory is available online at http://www.nlgja.org. A print version of the directory can be ordered at $3 a copy.

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(copyright: Editor & Publisher October 16, 1999) [Caption]