IBM to Offer Benefits Plan to Gays’ Partners
IBM said Thursday that it will extend health-care coverage and other benefits to the partners of its gay and lesbian employees, making the computer company the largest U.S. business to adopt such a policy.
The decision applies to all 110,000 U.S. employees of International Business Machines Corp., company executives said.
In the last two years, a few hundred American businesses have offered benefits to employees’ unmarried domestic partners, but none is as big as Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM, the nation’s sixth-largest company and a frequent bellwether of corporate trends.
Gay-rights activists expressed enthusiasm for the decision, which sources close to the company said had been discussed among top executives for almost three years.
“This is a monumental step forward,” said Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group based in Washington. “This is like having a small-sized city make the decision to fully value its gay citizens. . . . IBM is one of the oldest and most recognized companies in the United States. It sends a strong message to a lot of other companies.”
Lawrence F. Burtoft, a social research analyst at conservative advocacy group Focus on the Family of Colorado Springs, Colo., was critical. “It is an unfortunate decision because of its social effect of treating a homosexual relationship as the moral equivalent of marriage,” he said.
Burtoft, whose group was among those that successfully lobbied Congress to pass a bill to outlaw same-sex marriages, said the IBM move will be influential. “Certainly given IBM’s prestigious place in the corporate world, it’s going to have an effect,” he said.
IBM executives said their decision was based largely on business strategy. A number of competitors in the high-technology industry have recently offered similar benefits. They include Microsoft Corp., Apple Computer Inc., Xerox Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. IBM executives said they didn’t want to be in a position of losing talented workers to such rivals.
“We’re really doing this from a business point of view,” said Jill Kanin-Lovers, IBM vice president of human resources. “We want to be in a position to attract and retain a broad spectrum of employees.”
Statistics about organizations that offer domestic-partner benefits vary widely. According to one survey, conducted by an Oakland investment advisor who tracks companies’ policies toward gay workers, there are 50 publicly traded U.S. companies besides IBM offering domestic-partner benefits. Another study, conducted by Common Ground of Natick, Mass., a research firm that specializes in gay workplace issues, says 467 other businesses, educational institutions or government agencies offer such coverage.
IBM’s benefits plan, which in the past applied only to married couples, will as of Jan. 1 also cover medical, dental and vision care for same-sex partners. Opposite-sex unmarried partners will not be covered because such couples have the option of getting married, the company said. Same-sex couples who seek the benefits will have to sign an affidavit stating that they are in a committed, long-term relationship and share a household, Kanin-Lovers said.
