Company size is largest variable in gay-union benefits

When gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts, Cynthia Butler said, there was initially a lot of concern in human resources offices about how this would impact companies’ benefits. But that worrying proved to be premature.
“Quite frankly, there’s been little impact from a benefits standpoint,” said Butler, who has been in human resources for more than 20 years. In fact, she said, from an administrative standpoint, gay marriage made things a little easier.
The president of Butler and Associates human resources consulting, she is also the co-director of governmental affairs for the Rhode Island State Council of the Society for Human Resource Management. She has several clients in Massachusetts.
In the past, Butler said, companies used domestic partnerships to give benefits to employees’ significant others. But domestic partnership benefits required documents and affidavits to validate that two people were in a domestic partnership.
Now with gay marriage, employers do not need to go through the paperwork – they can simply treat gay marriage like a heterosexual marriage.
Rhode Island has now entered the fray over whether or not to follow in Massachusetts’ footsteps and become the second state to legalize gay marriage. A bill sponsored by Rep. Arthur Handy, D-Cranston, proposes to legalize gay marriage and give all the same benefits and rights to gay married couples that are afforded to heterosexual married couples in the state. There are also two current bills that call for civil unions in Rhode Island.
Handy said he has not received any feedback from the business community about this bill, but he added that a number of large companies already offer domestic partner benefits.
One such company is CVS/Caremark Corp. Spokesman Michael DeAngelis said CVS has been providing domestic partnership benefits, which are the same as spousal benefits, since 2000. He said that CVS will wait and see about the legalization of gay marriage, and has no comment until something is on the books.
A study published in March of last year – by Samir Luther, a workplace manager for the Human Rights Campaign Foundation – found that the number of employers offering domestic partnerships has increased over the last decade. As of 2006, 49 percent of Fortune 500 corporations and 78 percent of the Fortune 100 offered health benefits to employees’ domestic partners, compared with 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies in 2000.
David Goldman, president of the Human Resource Management Association of Rhode Island, a local chapter of the Society for Human Resources Management, said it is currently a company’s choice whether it recognizes domestic partnerships in its policies and benefits.
He added that larger companies are typically the first ones to do so, “only because I think they know they’ll have to deal with the issue sooner or later; better to be amongst the frontrunners and learn what works and what doesn’t.”
Goldman said that larger companies also have more resources to devote to the human resources side of gay marriage than small companies. For instance, he said, a firm with only a couple of employees does not have time or the manpower to think about gay marriage, unlike a large company, which has hired people to think about future strategies.
However, there still may be some legal problems ahead.
Andrew Sherman, senior vice president of the Segal Co., a national employee benefits consulting firm based in New York that deals with human resources issues, said that federal law still limits benefits for same-sex married couples in Massachusetts (he works out of the firm’s Boston office).
That is due to the Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996, which not only said states didn’t need to recognize same-sex marriages, but also specifically barred the federal government from doing so.
Sherman said the law has broad ramifications, because its definition of marriage as being strictly between one man and one woman then gets applied when marriage comes up in other laws, such as the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which governs employee benefits.
Other areas affected by this are federal income taxes and 401(k)s. Sherman said in Massachusetts, a gay married couple must file separate federal income tax statements as single taxpayers. With 401(k)s, same-sex spouses cannot automatically inherit the balance if the person dies; instead, the spouse has to be explicitly designated.
All in all, Goldman said there are still many questions.
“There is potential for there to be a lot more study done before anyone gets the real hang of … what same-sex marriage means when it’s mandated by the state in the workplace,” Goldman said.