More and more companies have either instituted adoption benefits or increased the ones they already offer, convinced that it just makes good business sense, according to the Houston Chronicle.

At J.P. Morgan Chase in Texas, "adoptions are treated just like the regular birth of a child. We know that adoptive parents consider it no different," says Dee Dee Guzman, a work/life solutions manager for the bank.

The Chronicle reports that last year, despite the economic decline, Chase increased its adoption reimbursement from $6,000 to $10,000. Guzman describes the new amount as "a gut feel of what it would cost to adopt."

"We find it to be a huge retention and recruitment tool," she adds, "and the bank is very interested in doing the right thing all the time."

Adam Pertman, an adoption advocate and author of the book "Adoption Nation," calls adoption benefits a simple issue of equity.

"The employees who can give birth get good benefits commensurate with that process. It is truly a simple matter of fairness," Pertman tells the Chronicle. "It's really not a very large investment to any company because relatively few employees avail themselves of it. And as a percentage of any company's income compared to what it pays out to other benefits relating to childbirth, it's nothing.

"If Wendy's can afford to do it, most of the other companies can afford to do it. They simply don't think of doing it in most cases. It isn't because they're callous. It's because people haven't raised the question."

Dave Thomas, founder of the Wendy's fast-food chain and himself an adopted child, gets much of the credit for the movement. Thomas, who died in January of liver cancer, didn't discover he was adopted until he was 13.

"He felt betrayed, he felt angry," Pertman says. "In the end, he turned that anger into a powerful, positive force. He was able to see through his own experience that a family is better than not a family. He was an inspiration to corporate leaders. There's nothing more powerful than a personal story."

Thomas created a foundation in 1992 to help the 134,000 children in the public welfare system find permanent homes. And he would routinely pick up the phone and ask other CEOs point-blank to offer adoption benefits.

"People were so flabbergasted and said, `Why not? If Wendy's can do it, we better,'" recalls Rita Soronen, executive director of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption in Dublin, Ohio. "Dave Thomas understood the power of his voice in this adoption issue. He was a humble man and yet, people responded to him in such a way, so that if he said, `Why don't you offer this?,' people took it very seriously."

Soronen tells the Chronicle that less than one-half of 1 percent of employees use adoption benefits that employers offer.

"It costs the employer very little to enhance their image as being very family-friendly," she says. "And it keeps pace with current benefits trends."

According to the Chronicle, 65 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies partly reimburse their employees for adoption expenses - up from 20 percent five years ago.

Usually benefits are either a financial lump sum to help with adoption expenses or a policy of paid adoption leave, or both.

In the 2001 Benefits Survey published by the Society For Human Resource Management, 16 percent of its respondents offered adoption assistance, a 5 percent increase over the year before. Larger companies were more likely to offer the benefit than smaller ones.

Tammy Mayer, a senior promotions manager at New Jersey-based AstraZeneca, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, did some research on her company's adoption benefits and discovered that it offered no paid leave. Instead, the company had a $5,000 reimbursement policy, which it thought was adequate and fair.

Mayer disagreed. For one thing, she noted, the cost of hospitalization for a birth mother certainly exceeds $5,000. Second, she wanted six weeks paid time off, the same as what birth mothers received.

"I was adopting a baby who was going to be nearly 9 months old," she says of the baby boy she adopted from Guatemala last May. "At that point, bonding was going to be critical. Those initial weeks with him were critical to his entire character. I felt like if I didn't ask the company, I would be letting him down."

Mayer researched what other companies offered and wrote a proposal that she presented to her human resources department in September 2000. Mayer wasn't daunted by the fact that she worked for a huge corporation that employs more than 10,000 workers in the U.S. alone.

"I gathered the facts and made it easy for the company to evaluate," she tells the Chronicle. "I would give most of the credit to the folks who reviewed the information I sent. They did not have good reasons to not go with what I had suggested."

AstraZeneca, despite its size and all that implies about its bureaucracy, implemented a parental leave policy eight months after reading Mayer's proposal, according to the Chronicle. And it granted seven weeks paid leave - one week more than what Mayer had requested - to both adoptive and birth parents.

Links

• Houston Chronicle article