Copyright 1995 The New York Times Company  
The New York Times
December 15, 1995, Friday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section D;  Page 4;  Column 5;  Business/Financial Desk 

LENGTH: 528 words

HEADLINE: New York Union Fund to Pay $1 Million in AIDS Bias Case

BYLINE:  By MILT FREUDENHEIM 

BODY:
In a groundbreaking settlement of discrimination charges against a health plan that limited medical payments to people with AIDS, a construction workers' union welfare fund in New York agreed yesterday to pay a total of about $1 million for medical bills and emotional distress.

The Mason Tenders District Council Welfare Fund agreed to the payments in a case involving 14 workers who had AIDS or were H.I.V.-positive. Eleven of the 14 have died since the first complaints were filed in 1992 with the New York office of the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The union fund, which had assets of more than $250 million last December, agreed to seek out and pay compensation to other workers who may have been discriminated against, but who have not come forward to file complaints.

Attempts to reach the union for comment on the case last night were unsuccessful.

The 12 Mason Tenders locals represent general laborers, brick haulers and asbestos-removal workers at construction sites in the region.

The union and its welfare fund have been supervised by a court-appointed monitor since December 1994, in a separate settlement of Federal civil corruption charges by union officials known as organized-crime figures who had been accused of milking the fund.

Under a consent agreement approved by United States District Judge John E. Sprizzo in Manhattan, Terrence P. Donaghey Jr., a 36-year-old Queens construction worker who filed one of the first AIDS benefit cases, will get $16,000 for emotional distress and an unspecified amount for medical bills. He could not be reached yesterday for comment.

"My disease is not a popular disease within the union," Mr. Donaghey said when he filed the complaint. "My union is literally killing me."

Ten other workers, or their estates, will divide $389,000 in payments for emotional distress. James Lee, a regional lawyer with the commission, said the union fund would pay at least "$500,000 in back medical bills and $500,000 in compensatory damages" after other workers with AIDS had been reached.

The cases were among the first involving AIDS to be filed under the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, which extended the anti-discrimination protection of civil rights laws to job-related complaints.

Judge Sprizzo ruled in November 1993 that the Mason Tender complaints were covered by the disabilities law, so the union health plan had to justify a policy that cut off benefits for people with AIDS since 1991.

"Nothing we've found in any way justified the exclusion of these individuals," Mr. Lee said. "It was merely based on pure bias. They were paying for other high-priced diseases like cancer and heart disease, but they were excluding these individuals."

Cary LaCheen, a senior staff lawyer with the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which filed several of the complaints, said: "We hope these settlements send a message to other employers and insurers. The court decision in our case establishes that these funds are subject to the A.D.A., and they have the burden of justifying why they are treating people with AIDS or any other disability differently."