It was just 40 years ago that the modern gay rights movement took hold.

No one who was arrested at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village when the police raided it and the crowd fought back could have imagined in just two generations there would be states in the nation that had legalized same-sex marriage.

None of them could have foreseen that negotiators at bargaining tables across the country would be calling for companies to treat the partners of gay and lesbian employees the same as they would heterosexual spouses.

Now Congress is debating the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would make discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identification illegal.

But while more than half of Fortune 500 companies have prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation since 1996 and with the majority of the corporations providing domestic partnership benefits since 2006, still 51 percent of all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered workers hide that fact of their identity from some, if not all of their co-workers, according to a report released last month by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.

According to the report, only 5 percent of younger workers are out at work while 20 percent of older workers are.

"The majority of LGBT workers (51 percent) hide their LGBT identity to most at work, the simplest indication that more work needs to be done to translate inclusive policies into an inclusive climate," the report states.

Part of the work at the local level to create inclusiveness for the LGBT community is being done by unions, with the AFL-CIO trying to make sure that there is representation in every central labor council and a state federation.

Jo Kenny, the interim director of the Pride at Work, an AFL-CIO constituency group, said if the LGBT community is not at the table, the issues affecting that community are ignored.

For such workers, Ms. Kenny said, the ultimate issue is whether they are vulnerable to being fired, which is what a federal Employee Non-Discrimination Act would address. "Having the AFL-CIO come out in support of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act really means something," she said.

But for workers, there are other concerns, such as comments and jokes by co-workers about gay people. The report said 58 percent of LGBT workers reported jokes or negative comments about the community are made by coworkers at least once in a while and 54 percent of those workers who are not open about it said they have lied about their personal lives at work.

The Human Rights Campaign report has a list of ways that companies can help their LGBT employees feel more comfortable at work, such as including the words "partner" or "significant other" in written communications in which "spouse" is used and instituting a zero-tolerance policy for jokes about members of the community and other minority groups.

The report said managers can also be more supportive of LGBT families, including asking about partners as they would about spouses, to show a level of comfort.

But when it comes to the national issue of whether Congress should pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, Ms. Kenny said the message to elected officials is that they can freely support it. "Organized labor has your back," she said.

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