This year, the US Supreme Court will get a chance to say whether federal civil rights law protects gay and transgender employees from discrimination, and California courts will grapple with recent changes making it harder for Golden State businesses to label workers as independent contractors. McDermott’s Michael Sheehan looked at these and other cases to watch in 2020 in a recent article for Law360.
Originally published by Law360, January 2020
A growing number of medical organizations, courts and administrative bodies have stated that transition-related medical care is medically necessary and should be covered by employer-sponsored medical plans. Access to employer-sponsored healthcare coverage for transgender workers has become an issue of focus for civil rights advocacy groups such as Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union, and there has been an uptick in discrimination lawsuits filed against health plans and insurers denying such care.
These trends highlight the importance of weighing the legal and business considerations that come with providing (or not providing) comprehensive health benefits for transgender workers. Health plan sponsors and insurers should consider how the decision to provide or exclude transition-related medical coverage will affect their legal compliance, overall costs and workplace culture—all of which are discussed in this article.
Originally published in Benefits Magazine, August 2019.
Todd Solomon urged employers to “get past” a reluctance to deal with transgender employee concerns and “press the issue in order to create a comfortable and inclusive environment” in the workplace. “Support for LGBT employees must come from the top down in order to be effective, and it has to be evidenced by concrete actions in addition to mere words,” Mr. Solomon stated.
Originally published in The SHRM Blog (Society for Human Resource Management), March 26, 2018.
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