Corporate AIDS Policies Found Lacking : Workplace: About 20% of big U.S. firms have formally addressed the issue. Others may not be prepared to deal with the disease.

Ten years ago, when AIDS was considered a “gay disease” and stigma went hand-in-hand with suffering, some concerned Levi Strauss & Co. employees decided to set up a booth at the company to hand out information about the illness.

Fearing an unreceptive public, they asked management for help. Among the first volunteers was Chief Operating Officer Robert D. Haas, great-great-grandnephew of the San Francisco blue jeans company’s founder.

Haas, now the company’s chief executive, has been committed to AIDS education ever since. Last Wednesday in Washington, he became the first recipient of an award from the National Leadership Coalition on AIDS for his “pioneering work in shaping the business sector’s response to AIDS.”

Unfortunately, AIDS activists contend, Haas is the exception in corporate America. Misconceptions about AIDS and discrimination against workers with AIDS--and the human immunodeficiency virus that causes it--still abound, they say.

As evidence they cite the widespread public concern and confusion that followed Lakers star Earvin (Magic) Johnson’s bombshell that he had tested positive for HIV. Many of the same questions that arose last week have been dogging those with HIV for years: How contagious is it? Can I get it from my co-workers? Does testing HIV positive mean I automatically have AIDS?

Few companies have policies that explicitly address the issue of HIV and AIDS.

“Of Fortune 500 companies, about 20% have a formal policy and/or practice” for dealing with AIDS in the workplace, said B. J. Stiles, president of the National Leadership Coalition on AIDS, a Washington-based organization representing business, labor and volunteers. The percentage is probably half that if small firms, where most American employees work, are included.

Companies with AIDS policies--formal or unwritten--tend to be headquartered in metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and New York that have been hit hard by the epidemic, Stiles said. White-collar companies dominate, particularly those in high technology, publishing and communications. By contrast, companies in the hospitality, food services and travel industries have not been front-runners.

There are exceptions. DAKA International, a Boston company that operates Fuddruckers restaurants, has adopted a written policy and is actively engaged in educating employees.

“There’s so much emotion with this disease,” said Louise A. Faucher, DAKA’s corporate representative for AIDS education. “You can’t bury your head in the sand. (Sooner or later), the whole hospitality industry is going to be affected.”

Other companies with progressive policies include Kaiser Permanente, Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America, Digital Equipment Corp. and General Motors, which operates an AIDS program jointly with the United Auto Workers.

Many companies simply treat AIDS as they would any other life-threatening disease, said Allan Halcrow, editor of Personnel Journal, a trade publication in Costa Mesa.

Levi, for one, has no formal written AIDS policy but nonetheless specifies in a company pamphlet that “HIV/AIDS is treated like any other life-threatening illness” with respect to medical coverage, disability leave and life insurance.

Levi was one of the first to adopt a program for dealing with AIDS in the workplace, and it has donated more than $2 million to AIDS groups around the world.

Corporate AIDS policies tend to address at least three broad issues, Halcrow said. The company usually states that it will not discriminate against an HIV-infected worker, that it will accommodate an ill employee’s schedule to the extent possible and that the employee’s situation will remain confidential unless he or she wants to tell co-workers.

At Levi and many other companies, activists say, education plays a key role.

Jill Foley, a spokeswoman at Pacific Bell in San Francisco, said the company and its employees have learned a lot since the day years ago when a Los Angeles crew balked at installing phones in an AIDS foundation office out of fear that they could get infected.

Pacific Bell offers AIDS education seminars, sponsors support groups and encourages employees with AIDS “to work as long as they feel they can.”

At many small companies, Stiles said, AIDS is still treated as a scourge, with the result that workers and employers have no strategy to deal with the strong emotions and disruptions that can result.

“Deferral and denial appear to be why many smaller employers are not prepared” to deal with the disease, Stiles said.

A recent survey by Crain’s Detroit Business found that area employers were “still courting legal disaster” in their handling of AIDS. Fewer than half of the employers surveyed said they would let an employee with AIDS, regardless of whether there are symptoms, remain on the job. In California, New York and other states, as well as some cities, it is illegal to fire someone strictly because of AIDS or HIV. Such protections are being extended to federal law as of next July.

Earlier this year, a Massachusetts man filed a complaint against his former employer, New England Telephone Co., alleging that he had been fired from his job after revealing that he had tested positive for HIV. The case is still in litigation.

It was not the first time that the Boston-based phone company had been involved in an AIDS-related controversy. Five years ago, an employee who said he had been dismissed after his supervisor learned that he had AIDS won reinstatement to his job in an out-of-court settlement. He died two years later.

That case prompted a drastic change in the company’s methods of dealing with AIDS, pushing it into the vanguard of employers attempting to educate themselves and others.

Stiles, with the AIDS coalition, said the most difficult challenge facing AIDS activists is that “we still don’t have a coherent national strategy.” But he added that the decision by Magic Johnson to confront the virus head-on should help.

“His willingness to step forward is nothing but an asset,” Stiles said. “He will make an enormous difference.”

Times researcher Norma Kaufman contributed to this story.