Court Opinion

ID: 9465375
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 00:44:50.729746+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:09.168727
License: Public Domain

COFFIN, Chief Judge
(concurring).
I concur fully in the court’s result and analysis, but I write to express my reservations about the opinion’s tangential goal of commenting on problems created for future courts by Manhart and this holding. While I agree with the court that Manhart’s rejection of sex-based actuarial tables extends to our situation, I am not sure that Manhart held that an employer could never offer a benefit plan using sex-based tables. To say the same thing another way, I am not sure that every employer-sponsored annuity or life insurance plan must both pay in and pay out the same amount for equally situated men and women. The question of what kind of plan might be legal is not before us.
The plan that is before us, as I see it, fails because it is as if a company paid its male and female employees equal salaries, but in the form of chits that could be redeemed only in a particular store which, the company knew, would give to one sex more for the same number of chits than to the other sex. That company could hardly claim that it was not discriminating between men and women. So here. Perhaps, however, once they turn their attention to the problem, the parties could work out a system permissible under Manhart that would eliminate the chit-like nature of the contributions through a set of genuine employee options or other features. If so, perhaps the system could legally include unequal, actuarially sound pension and life insurance benefits for participating men and women. I would not want to foreclose creative approaches to the problem by reading Manhart more restrictively than necessary. Therefore, I do not join in the court’s comments on Man-hart to the extent they go beyond the facts of our case. By the same token I do not necessarily share the court’s views of the problems it apprehends may lie ahead.