VIEWPOINTS : DEALING WITH AIDS IN THE WORKPLACE : The Deadly Disease Affects Both Afflicted Workers and Their Colleagues. Some Firms, Including Pacific Bell, Are Responding Well

Managers who think that AIDS is not a business problem deny the facts. Among 273 companies responding to a 1987 American Society for Personnel Administration survey, one-third acknowledged having workers with AIDS.

And AIDS affects people who do not have the disease. Employees afraid of infected co-workers have walked off the job, and workers have refused to share tools or even sit in the cafeteria with a stricken co-worker.

There also is the grief over the loss of friends and colleagues. In a society where the workplace is not just a source of a paycheck but also a source of community, where fellow workers are also friends, there is no way to build a wall around AIDS.

So how should companies respond? In answering that question for itself, Pacific Bell has become a model of intelligent action.

For one thing, Pacific Bell treats its employees well. When a repairman learned that he had AIDS, he worried whether he would--or could--keep his job. But the supervisor of operations, Chuck Woodman, promised to keep him working and called the repairman’s superior to enlist his support.

Woodman, who oversees 750 people, was known as a tough guy whose heroes included John Wayne and George Patton. A devout Mormon and father of eight, he might seem to some an unlikely supporter of people with AIDS. But shortly after Woodman moved to San Francisco, an employee who worked for him died of AIDS. Woodman’s attitudes began to change at the funeral. As he listened to the minister talking about how angry it made him that people with AIDS were shunned, he too began to feel that anger. In his words, “The whole moral question of homosexuality got put aside.”

Medical coverage of AIDS was never in serious jeopardy at Pacific Bell. The company’s executive director of human resources policy and services says bluntly, “People with AIDS are sick. We don’t fire sick people.” The company estimated that the lifetime cost of medical treatment for an AIDS patient ran close to $30,000, about the same as for other life-threatening diseases such as cancer. But the company changed its coverage to better serve AIDS patients and others with life-threatening illnesses. Employees can now choose more personal--and for the company, less expensive--alternatives to hospitalization, such as at-home hospice care. And because AIDS drugs are most readily available by mail, Pacific Bell’s insurance coverage now includes mail-order drugs.

Pacific Bell also teaches employees about the disease. In 1985, Woodman and Michael Eriksen, then the company’s director of preventive medicine and health education, started an AIDS Education Task Force. Eriksen had been aware of the concern about AIDS for several years. There was the coin collector who refused to touch the phone booths in the predominately gay Castro district of San Francisco.

And the Los Angeles crew that balked at installing phones at a hospice where there were people with AIDS. And the lineman who refused to use the truck of a fellow employee, rumored to have died of AIDS, until it was sterilized. The task force consists of company nurses and volunteer union members trained by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation who give presentations around the city.

The company has reached beyond its own boundaries to educate the public as well. In 1986, Pacific Bell helped sponsor the first conference on “AIDS in the Workplace” and produced the first AIDS video aimed at business. The video explored the medical evidence and emotional issues in great detail. It has been shown on PBS and in France and Japan. The year after the first video, the company spent nearly $100,000 to promote a Spanish video on the subject. Pacific Bell, long known for avoiding social issues, has even gone so far as to take a public stand on contentious political issues, coming out against California ballot propositions opposed by groups supporting the rights of people with AIDS.

Pacific’s motives in dealing with AIDS were not entirely altruistic. While many individuals in the company pushed it to do the “right” things, others also had political concerns. The company’s recent history was blemished by disclosures of shoddy business practices, mishandling of the gay community, tension among co-workers and a reputation for being socially and politically backward. AIDS became the issue through which Pacific could do well by doing good.

After the 1984 breakup of American Telephone & Telegraph, the company found itself in a completely different competitive mode. It had to appeal to constituencies previously ignored or thought to be the enemy. The company had to become more responsive to a diverse community and shed its bad-guy image. AIDS was to be the vehicle for, and measure of, the company’s transformation.

Nor was the decision unanimous to make AIDS a high priority on the corporate agenda. Pacific Bell’s former medical director actually had regarded it a as relatively minor health concern. (For the record, the company denies this, saying it always viewed AIDS as serious a matter as heart disease or cancer.) And top management, fearful that AIDS would taint the corporate image, declined the initial invitation to support an AIDS video.

Ultimately, people such as Steve Coulter, Pacific Bell’s director of consumer affairs, Michael Eriksen, and Chuck Woodman prevailed. To Coulter, a visible presence on AIDS was politically, operationally and morally necessary. To Eriksen, AIDS was not only important but also urgent. To middle managers such as Woodman who knew firsthand the uncertainty and fear among workers, acting decisively on AIDS was both right and good for the company.

AIDS has revealed much about Pacific Bell. Inevitably it will reveal much about other business enterprises. It is not a garden-variety disease that calls for standard responses and ordinary policies. It is new and frightening and loaded with bias, contention and misinformation. AIDS calls on us to rethink the boundary between the company and the public domain and between employer and employee. Our responses will show the character of our business organizations.