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After Same-Sex Marriage Ruling, States Reconsider Domestic Partner Benefits

After Same-Sex Marriage Ruling, States Reconsider Domestic Partner Benefits

By Rebecca Beitsch, Stateline.org (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, some states that offer health and retirement benefits to their employees’ domestic partners are considering changing those policies, in large part to save money or avoid discrimination lawsuits.

Before the ruling, 34 percent of state and local governments allowed unmarried same-sex couples to receive health care benefits, while 28 percent did so for domestic partners of the opposite sex, according to a study of public sector benefits by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Based on what happened in states that legalized gay marriage on their own, those numbers are about to dwindle.

Maryland ended domestic partner benefits for state employees, which it offered only to same-sex couples, just a few months after it legalized same-sex marriage in 2013. Arizona did the same after its legalization in 2014. Alaska still offers same-sex domestic partner benefits to the roughly 6,000 state employees it covers, but it is now reviewing that policy. The majority of Alaska state employees get their health insurance through state-funded union health trusts, and the state’s largest union, the Alaska State Employees Association, ended same-sex domestic partner benefits for the more than 8,500 state and municipal employees it covers.

Connecticut and Delaware never offered domestic partner benefits to their workers, but they did allow those in civil unions to add their partners to their health and retirement plans. The two states scrapped those benefits once same-sex couples could marry.

Of the 13 states that prohibited same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court’s June ruling (Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas), only Michigan offered anything similar to domestic partner benefits, as employees could add to their plan one adult they were not related to. Matthew Fedorchuk with the Michigan Civil Service Commission, which oversees state benefits, said the fate of those benefits could be hashed out in ongoing labor negotiations.

Government workers are likely to see more changes than those in the private sector.

Bruce Elliott, manager of compensation and benefits for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), cited a survey of 153 companies by Mercer, a health care advocacy group, which found that although some companies had plans to get rid of their domestic partner benefits, many were not planning changes. Of the 19 percent that offered domestic partner benefits to same-sex couples, 23 percent said they would drop the option in the next year, while another 23 percent said they would do so over the next two or three years. The majority of companies offered domestic partner benefits to both homosexual and heterosexual couples, and 62 percent of those said they were not planning any changes.

Elliott said domestic partner benefits may be more vulnerable within state and local government, where competition over employees isn’t as fierce as in the private sector and where leaders have been under pressure to keep finances in check since the recession.

Cathryn Oakley, senior legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights advocacy group, said the group is encouraging public and private employers to keep offering domestic partner benefits. But she said employers that offer domestic partner benefits exclusively to same-sex couples should extend them to heterosexual couples to avoid discrimination lawsuits.

That risk is part of the reason the capital city of Annapolis, Md., decided to end its domestic partner benefit program.

“We had added it because the law didn’t treat people equally,” Paul Rensted, former human resources manager for the city, said of the program, created in 2010. Now all city employees must be married to add an adult to their benefits package, and Rensted said couples were given six months’ notice, with four employees ultimately marrying.

Many in the gay rights community say keeping domestic partner benefits would continue to benefit some in the gay community as well as other nontraditional families. But straight couples would continue to be the biggest user of the benefits, they say.
“Millennials are waiting longer to get married, but that doesn’t mean they’re not living together — they’re not all living with mom and dad,” said SHRM’s Elliott.

Nancy Polikoff, a family law professor at American University Washington College of Law, said she likes “plus one” policies that allow employees to take care of their families, whether it be a spouse, a partner or an aging relative.

“The purpose of providing benefits is to help employees fund the financial and emotional obligations in their homes, and marriage is not always a part of that,” she said.

She pointed to Salt Lake City’s plan as a model. City employees can add any adult to their plan as long as they live together.
Jodi Langford, who oversees the benefits program for the city, said it has been used to cover parents, siblings and unmarried children older than 26 who would otherwise age out of their parents’ health insurance plans. Of the 60 people on the plan before same-sex marriage was made legal, only about 10 have switched to spousal benefits.

“If we stop, we would have parents, siblings, boyfriends and girlfriends who would be without benefits,” Langford said. While the program is secure for now, she said there’s been some talk about reviewing it within the next year.

In Florida, public universities are planning to review their domestic partner benefits. Because only spouses are eligible for state-funded benefits, state universities had to come up with creative solutions to offer benefits to gay employees’ domestic partners. It was an anonymous gift that covered the additional cost of adding an adult beneficiary to a health plan at Florida State University (FSU) starting in 2014, while the University of North Florida (UNF) began covering the additional cost to employees through its fundraising foundation in 2006.

Spokesmen for both universities said the programs played a role in attracting talent. UNF is winding down its program, which had only been offered to same-sex couples, said Vice President and Chief of Staff Tom Serwatka.

“When we went to this, we did so on the basis that heterosexual couples had a choice whether they wanted to marry and understood the full implication of that choice. Homosexual couples didn’t have that choice.” Now that they do, Serwatka said, it makes less sense for the university to raise private funds to pay for the benefits.

“The university wasn’t trying to change the idea of marriage as the policy for the state, and state funding required marriage,” he said.

FSU is reviewing its program, which only paid for health insurance for domestic partners who could not get insurance through their work, said spokesman Dennis Schnittker.

“The gift was made under the belief of the donor that the state would be funding the benefit in the near future,” he said.
In some states, however, domestic partner benefits are likely to continue.

California’s domestic partner benefit statutes remain intact, and in Massachusetts the policy is part of a still-standing executive order. Maine and Vermont, which was the first state to offer domestic partner benefits, are not planning to change their programs.

“We wouldn’t just get rid of it because same-sex marriage has come about,” said Tom Cheney, deputy commissioner for Vermont’s Department of Human Resources. “The state of Vermont has long seen the value in offering domestic partner benefits to couples of all types. It’s a useful recruitment and retention tool for the state as an employer.”

Elliott believes it’s too early to know what most employers — both public and private — will do with domestic partner benefits.

“Once we get past this year into next year’s open enrollment, we’re going to see some real change. The tea leaves haven’t dried yet,” he said.

Photo: Paola Perez, left, and her partner Linda Collazo, dressed as bride and groom, kiss as they march in the annual Gay Pride parade in Greenwich Village, in 2011 in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

On Docks, Workers Still Have Power

On Docks, Workers Still Have Power

By Chris Kirkham and Andrew Khouri, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — More than 4,400 ships bring nearly $400 billion worth of goods through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, a crucial link in the global supply chain of factories, warehouses, docks, highways and rail lines.

Wages for most blue-collar workers along the chain have fallen with the quick rise of global trade. But the longshoremen who move the goods the shortest distance, between ship and shore, have shrewdly protected pay that trumps that of many white-collar managers.

About half of West Coast union longshoremen make more than $100,000 a year — some much more, according to shipping industry data. More than half of foremen and managers earn more than $200,000. A few bosses make more than $300,000. All get free health care.

Longshoreman pay dwarfs that of almost all other transit employees, such as trucking, railroad or airline workers. At massive warehouse complexes in the Inland Empire, just an hour’s drive from the ports, goods for the nation’s largest retailers are shuttled around by temporary workers making as little as $10 or $11 an hour, with no benefits or job security.

The unique clout of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union came into sharp relief recently with the partial shutdown of 29 West Coast ports. The crisis passed with a contract deal a week ago, but it will take up to three months to clear the backlog of cargo on the docks and ships stranded offshore. Many businesses and workers won’t recover the money they lost because of port gridlock.

Union spokesman Craig Merrilees said the shipping companies’ pay figures fail to account for the more than 8,000 so-called casual workers — part-timers who don’t receive benefits and often work for years to become registered union members. The data, released by the Pacific Maritime Association, reflect 90 percent of the “registered” union members or more than 12,000 workers.

The association declined a Los Angeles Times request for similar pay data for casual workers and about 1,100 lower-tier union members.

“They don’t want to talk about the other workers,” Merrilees said. “I don’t think it’s responsible.”

How the Pacific longshoremen have weathered forces that have crippled many other unions is a tale of foresight, geography, and technology.

A deal cut by union leaders half a century ago allowed workers to share in the gains from innovations in efficiency, such as modern shipping containers. Another key move: organizing all West Coast ports in the 1930s under a single contract, which prevents shipping companies from pitting workers at neighboring ports against one another.

More recently, longshoremen benefited from the rise of U.S. trade with other Pacific Rim countries, positioning the ports as a strategic nexus, another key leverage point in wage talks.

“So many labor unions don’t have that power anymore,” said Ruth Milkman, a professor specializing in labor movements at City University of New York. “Here’s a place where globalization has benefited the union, whereas the opposite is true in manufacturing.”

Since 1980, container traffic through West Coast ports has grown more than sixfold, according to the most recent data from the American Association of Port Authorities. Pacific ports now handle 52 percent of U.S. cargo volume, compared with 41 percent at East Coast ports.

Unlike factories, ports can’t be moved to low-wage countries. The jobs are “impervious to outsourcing,” said John Ahlquist, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who has studied port unions worldwide.

The longshoremen’s union has served as a gatekeeper for new entrants to the industry. There are more than 13,000 registered union longshoremen, clerks, and foremen, according to West Coast shipping industry data from 2013.

But the more than 8,000 casual workers compete daily for hours of dock work, hoping to snag leftover shifts after union members get first pick. Many toil for years in a part-time holding pattern, waiting for a new round of hiring.

Patience can pay off. Full-fledged union members are divided into three classes: longshoremen, clerks, and foremen/walking bosses.

The majority are longshoremen, about half of whom — 4,900 — made more than $100,000 in 2013, according to shipping company data; 1,400 longshoremen made more than $150,000 in 2013, according to the data.

More than half of the 600 foremen and walking bosses took home more than $200,000. At the top end, 85 of them earned more than $250,000.

Overtime, paid at higher rates, accounts for about a third of all hours worked, according to the shipping industry. Longshoremen also get bonuses for specific skills and night shifts.

Michael Dimon got his start on the docks in 1978, following his father and great-grandfather. He’s proud of the wages he earns and credits collective bargaining for allowing him to buy a home and save money for his two children to attend college. Dimon never finished high school.

Before 2013, he said, he never made more than $100,000 a year. That year he made $117,000, he said. Last year, he made more, as port traffic at Los Angeles and Long Beach surged to the third-busiest year on record. He declined to say how much.

“I would never pretend to be ashamed of the wages that we negotiate and fight for — absolutely not,” Dimon said. “What it allows me to do is live the American dream. And sadly to say, it’s dying here in America.”

The longshoreman’s dream was forged by a series of strategic decisions that have given the ILWU unparalleled strength.

In the 1930s, West Coast port union leaders succeeded in negotiating a single contract that linked ports from the Pacific Northwest to San Diego.

In 1960, the ILWU cut a deal that paved the way for a revolution in shipping. For centuries, longshoremen had used highly labor-intensive methods when loading and unloading ships — nets, metal hooks, and pallets. The union offered to embrace the use of containers in exchange for higher pay and benefits, along with richer pensions and buyouts for displaced workers.

The strategy continues to define the union’s approach. In 2002, contract negotiations broke down in part over computer systems intended to replace clerical workers who tracked cargo. The deal led to the elimination of hundreds of clerical jobs, but the union negotiated substantial increases in pension benefits and held on to free healthcare.

In the contract talks resolved last month, one of the main sticking points was over who should maintain and repair the trailers that truckers use to haul goods from the ports. Shipping lines recently outsourced the equipment to third-party companies, threatening the union’s maintenance jobs.

Merrilees, the union spokesman, said the union retained the right to do some inspections and repairs on the trailers. But trade experts said the presence of third-party companies could continue to complicate the issue.

Experts point out that the ILWU’s unique place in the supply chain has allowed it to benefit despite automation. But it’s unclear how long the union can prevent technology from eroding pay and job security.

The union may struggle to maintain high wages in a low-wage transportation network, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“The nail’s sticking up,” he said, “and people have hammers.”

Photo: John Morgan via Flickr

Supreme Court Knocks Down Promised Health Benefits For Union Retirees

Supreme Court Knocks Down Promised Health Benefits For Union Retirees

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court cast doubt Monday on the future of old union contracts that had promised lifetime health benefits for retired workers and their families.

In a case seen as a victory for corporate America, the justices ruled that those promises are not “vested” rights unless they are spelled out in “clear and express language.” And if they are not, they may be canceled when a new contract takes effect, the court said.

In the unanimous opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas chided lower-court judges who upheld the retiree benefits, citing “traditional principle that courts should not construe ambiguous writings to create lifetime promises.”

In decades past, union contracts often included a promise from the employer to pay for health care, even after the worker’s retirement. But as health care costs rose and companies changed hands, new owners objected to paying the benefits far into the future. They argued that the contracts applied only to the term of the agreements and not beyond.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers backed an appeal from the owners of a West Virginia polyester plant who objected to paying benefits to workers who had retired in 1996.

Their contract, negotiated by the United Steelworkers Union, promised a “full company contribution” to their health benefits. But in 2006, M&G Polymers, the new owners of the plant, said the retirees must contribute to the cost of their health benefits.

A group of retirees sued and won before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. Its judges said the negotiated benefits were a “form of delayed compensation.”

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the company’s appeal, and on Monday set aside the lower-court ruling that favored the retired workers.

Thomas told the lower court to take another look at the contract and to do so without “placing a thumb on the scale in favor of vested retired benefits.” He noted that federal law protects promised pensions, but it does not require employers to provide future benefits for health care.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed that “ordinary contract principles” apply in such disputes, but she left open the prospect that the old agreement could be read to promise benefits in the future. Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan signed the concurring opinion.

Photo: Matt H. Wade via Wikimedia Commons

Unemployment Insurance Is Not Reaching Those Who Need It

Unemployment Insurance Is Not Reaching Those Who Need It

The percentage of unemployed workers receiving unemployment insurance (UI) has reached its lowest point since 1987, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

During the Great Recession, which technically ended in 2009, unemployment spiked. As the EPI reports, “the UI recipiency rate reached about two-thirds of all unemployed workers” during this time.

The number of people receiving UI then fell precipitously in 2012 and 2013, because of unusually long-lasting unemployment bouts and cutbacks to UI funding made at both the state and federal levels. Throughout most of the economic downturn, Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) made it possible for the unemployed to receive additional benefits. UI usually lasts for 26 weeks, but the EUC program allowed unemployed workers to collect UI for at least seven additional weeks (sometimes longer, depending on the state). However, this program ended in December 2013, after Congress refused to pass legislation to extend it.

Many conservatives believed that ending long-term unemployment insurance would benefit the unemployed.

“When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you’re causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy,” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) claimed in December.

The evidence strongly disputes this claim.

Republicans often cite recent job growth as proof that their opposition to extending long-term unemployment benefits is correct. However, experts believe that job growth has prevailed in spite of — not because of — ending the benefits. The number of long-term unemployed dropped this summer, but there are still 3.1 million Americans who do not qualify for UI looking for work. That number is over 30 percent of the nation’s total unemployment rate. To make matters worse, the recent drop in the number of long-term unemployed can be explained by the surrender of those unemployed workers.

Alan Krueger, a Princeton professor and former member of the Obama administration, conducted a study that found that between 2008 and 2013, only 22 percent of long-term unemployed workers had found a full-time job, while 35 percent had stopped looking for work. This resignation is understandable considering that, as of July, job openings were available for less than half of all job seekers.

Data Viz LTUE KruegerCramerCho 01

Photo via Brookings.edu

The historically small share of jobless people receiving UI means that many of those who cannot find work (or have given up doing so) are receiving no aid.

This could be harming the economy. The Congressional Budget Office has long said that extended benefits boost the economy by increasing consumer spending. The UI system also helps sustain consumer demand through periods of economic downturn by providing money for families to spend.

Photo via Flickr

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