Patients Urged to Stay on Job : Many Firms Treat AIDS Like Other Major Illnesses

Many large U.S. corporations have confronted the AIDS epidemic with in-house educational programs and policies that treat AIDS like any other catastrophic, life-threatening illness, such as cancer or chronic heart disease.

Employees with AIDS are not removed by these firms because of the nature of their illness. Rather, they are encouraged to work as long as they are physically able and willing. If they become too sick to work, they are permitted to take disability leave.

“We’ve been there before with other employees with life-threatening illnesses,” said a spokesman for Bank of America in San Francisco, which was one of seven major corporations--among them, Levi Strauss, Wells Fargo and AT&T--that; sponsored AIDS educational seminars for smaller companies and published AIDS information brochures for their employees.

‘We Need Help’

“We realized that smaller companies could benefit from the experiences of the larger companies,” the Bank of America executive said. “Their response was: ‘We need help and don’t know what to do.’ They were real glad that other businesses had already done some groundwork.”

Because AIDS is not casually transmitted, the federal Public Health Service has strongly recommended that workers and children with the disease not be denied their jobs or access to classrooms.

Dozens of laws prohibiting AIDS discrimination have been enacted by states and municipalities across the nation, including Los Angeles. And the Supreme Court earlier this month ruled--in a case involving tuberculosis--that people with contagious diseases must be legally classified as handicapped and thus are covered by federal civil rights laws.

Times Policy

Dr. Wayne Buck, medical director of The Times, said that the newspaper has had several AIDS cases and that its philosophy is to “treat an AIDS patient the same as we would any other employee.”

He said: “If there is a fellow employee upset by this or fearful of it, our approach is that person can seek and will be assisted in finding a like job elsewhere in the company or can transfer to another shift. If they can’t deal with that, we encourage them to talk to our counseling folks to ease their anxiety and cope with their emotions.

“We will not permit them to force an action relative to that AIDS patient.”

James Conway, director of human resources for the National Assn. of Manufacturers, said that there is no typical corporate policy toward workers with acquired immune deficiency syndrome. “What employers are trying to do is find an accommodation between the afflicted person and the fears, whether reasonable or not, of the co-workers,” he said.

Helps When Asked

Dr. Robert T. (Chip) Schooley, who specializes in AIDS treatment and research at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, has intervened with employers, but only when his patients have asked for such help.

“My own view of the physician’s role is that he should be guided by his patients’ wishes,” Schooley said. “If a patient is trying to get his job back and I can help him do it, I’ll do it--hoping it will also help other people.”

He was asked to speak to the workers of one Boston-area company to assure the co-workers of one of his AIDS patients that they were in no danger. The climate of the meeting, Schooley remembered, was extremely hostile, and many of the questions he was asked were astonishing.

“Someone asked: ‘What if I worked in a manhole with him and I got bitten by a snake and Paul (the AIDS patient) tried to suck the venom out of my leg--could I get AIDS?’ ” Schooley said. And “only one of them asked a sensitive question” during the meeting itself.

“This worker said: ‘If Paul had cancer at this young age, we’d be talking about blood drives and what we could do to help his family. Instead, we’re all sitting here trying to take his job away. How can we deal with this contradiction?’ ”