Last week, Pew released a fairly detailed survey of LGBT opinion in the United States. One of the more interesting findings is that the top policy priority among LGBT Americans is equal employment rights, beating out marriage equality by 4 percentage points. This prioritization makes sense of course: the ability to have and hold employment — and thereby collect an income — is core to basically anything else you might want to do. Despite its importance and prioritization among LGBT individuals themselves, the economics of being LGBT in America has been overshadowed in mainstream discourse by other LGBT issues.
How bad is being LGBT in this economy? In short: very. The Movement Advancement Project recently released an enormous 148-page report covering just about anything you might want to know about the plight of LGBT workers in America. Here are just a tiny fraction of the details:
- LGBT identities are not protected by Title VII, and can therefore be discriminated against by employers in hiring, firing, compensation, and any other condition of employment.
- 38 percent of LGBT workers who are out to co-workers report suffering harassment and discrimination because of their LGBT identity.
- 26 percent of transgender workers report having lost a job because of their transgender identity.
- Same-sex couples with children are twice as likely to have household incomes near the poverty line.
- Single LGBT individuals with children are three times more likely to have incomes near the poverty line.
- Transgender people are nearly four times more likely to have household incomes below $10,000.
- Due to family requirements and marriage inequality, LGBT individuals miss out on a long list of economic benefits from health care to retirement to family leave as well as family tax credits.
Unlike marriage equality, which still tends to generate a considerable amount of opposition, surveys of voters find massive margins of support for implementing measures that protect LGBT workers from workplace discrimination. A May 2011 poll shows 73 percent of voters, and even 66 percent of Republicans, support such measures. A December 2011 poll shows that 77 percent of voters, and 67 percent of Republicans, support such measures.
Given these margins of public support across the political spectrum and the prioritization of the issue among LGBT individuals, you’d think — or at least hope — that adding LGBT identities to employment protection laws would be fairly low-hanging fruit legislatively. However, the main piece of federal legislation aiming to do so, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), has been floating around since 1994 and has yet to pass. Given the extraordinarly marginalized status of LGBT workers in the economy, it goes without saying that passing ENDA should be a major priority for those interested in economic justice.
