FedEx: A Step Closer to Delivering Equality

by Dana Rudolph · 2010-05-25 09:05:00 UTC
Topics:

Package-delivery giant FedEx has announced it will offer the same benefits to same-sex partners of employees as to opposite-sex spouses, starting in January 2012.

The company had been pulled from two major diversity rankings — the 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity and Fortune’s 2009 100 Best Companies to Work For — when organizers discovered it did not offer the benefits, reports Out & About. (Given that partner benefits are the most obvious corporate equality metric after a nondiscrimination policy, one wonders how they missed that.)

FedEx now matches rival UPS in its extension of benefits. It remains to be seen if it will also score a perfect 100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI), as did its competitor in brown last year. FedEx also added gender identity to its corporate nondiscrimination policy in 2009, reported the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition. It does not offer gender-identity inclusive diversity training or transgender-inclusive insurance coverage, however, according to last year’s CEI. (FedEx’s most recent CEI score, before the news about partner benefits, was 70. Criteria change every year, so it is impossible to say right now what FedEx’s new score will be.)

FedEx now joins the more than 80 percent of the Fortune 100 in offering same-sex domestic partner benefits. At a time when corporate America is rightly under fire for certain unscrupulous practices (with some sectors — financial services, big oil — at the front of the pack), here is one thing corporate America is doing right. While the federal Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA) is still in limbo, and states like Virginia are rescinding anti-discrimination protections for state employees, some of the country’s biggest corporations are leading the way towards equality. Even defense contractors such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon all scored 100 on the latest CEI.

FedEx's move is a step in the right direction. That doesn’t mean there isn’t more work to do to extend workplace protections and benefits, of course. Unlike your next FedEx package delivery, change that big doesn’t happen overnight.

Photo credit: Dano

Dana Rudolph is the founder and publisher of Mombian, a blog and resource directory for LGBT parents.

RELATED PETITION

Pass ENDA Now
SIGN PETITION
502 People
PREVIOUS STORY:
Iraqi Children Are Not Gay Terrorists
NEXT STORY:
Bullied high schooler convinces MPAA to change ‘Bully’ rating to “PG-13”

COMMENTS (3)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.