CPPA Director M.V. Lee Badgett (economics) has penned an editorial published in the Feb. 7, 2012, edition of the New York Times. The op-ed, titled “What Obama Should Do About Workplace Discrimination,” highlights how presidents dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt have used executive orders to strengthen anti-discrimination standards for workers employed by federal contractors.
In addition to heading the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Badgett is the research director at UCLA’s Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy. The New York Times op-ed comes on the heels of a study Badgett just released titled “The Impact of Extending Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Non-Discrimination Requirements to Federal Contractors.”
According to the study, between 14.3 and 15.3 million additional workers could offer health care benefits to their same-sex domestic partners if federal contractors were required to provide coverage for same-sex partners. Badgett points out, however, that employers would not likely incur large increases in their health care costs, as “only 40,000 to 136,000 of these employees would sign up a same-sex partner for coverage, and they would be spread out across tens of thousands of federal contractors.”
The New York Times piece appears in the wake of recent news that defense contractor DynCorp International changed its policies and now bans discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Read Badgett’s full piece here.