Re: Discrimination of Singles
In spite of what Atty Koury said, there are discrimination rules
in this context which protect those lowest on the financial
totem poles within companies.
Congress governs "qualified benefit plans" (this one
being a cafeteria plan, with employees selecting how to
spend their pretax dollars!). The IRS provides strict
rules to ensure fairness in these plans, for example,
to prevent the big wigs from taking all the benefits
for themselves and having less for the little guys
(called discrimination rules) but they most certainly
do allow this level of discrepency as an implementation
of public policy objectives. Almost every company gives
more to those who 'need' more from their cafeteria plans,
one way or another. Others do it by providing family
plans to all employees whether they have families or not,
which costs them more because of the families than because
of the singles.
Are you the same woman from Wisconson who spurned a
gentlemen's courtship, tattled on him to his boss, and
then wondered if she could make money by suing for
sexual harassment? If so, my label of gold-digger
now seems to have been verified; you could have married
that man and doubled your family benefit package even
if one of you quit!
Seriously, there's nothing wrong in the eyes of most Americans
with doing a little more for someone who has a family to support.
I once had a boss, a single person, as company president who made
some waves by doing the opposite: every employee got the same amount in
a cafeteria plan whether they had large families or none. He was a
maverick in his day. He felt like you, I guess. He lost the company
eventually.
