AIDS and the Workplace : Business Has a Long Way to Go in Confronting Fears of the Disease
A staff revolt erupted at a San Francisco men’s clothing store last year after employees found out that one of their co-workers was suffering from AIDS.
Seventeen of the store’s 25 employees threatened to walk out if the ailing salesman, who was on sick leave, came back to work. The salesman decided to return anyway, and a crisis was averted after mediators from the San Francisco Human Rights Commission allayed employees’ concerns about getting infected simply by working with someone with AIDS.
The initial reaction at the store was extreme, particularly for AIDS-conscious San Francisco. Yet 11 years after federal authorities identified the epidemic, many people infected with the AIDS virus or who suffer from full-blown cases of the disease still are hounded by the pervasive--and often irrational--fears of co-workers.
That fact was highlighted Monday when pro basketball star Earvin (Magic) Johnson announced that he was dropping his plans for a comeback with the Los Angeles Lakers and would retire. Johnson has linked his decision to, among other things, the concerns of other players about the possibility of contracting the AIDS virus from him.
Johnson said he “could see the fear upon people’s faces” after he cut his arm in an exhibition game Oct. 30. Those apprehensions emerged even though medical experts said there is no more than an infinitesimal chance that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, could be transmitted through contact on the basketball court.
“That’s the one common thread at all the workplaces I go to--a lasting fear even after obtaining information” about AIDS, said Christopher Laabs, who conducts AIDS seminars for companies in Los Angeles.
Unlike Johnson, most HIV-positive employees can’t afford to quit their jobs. As a result, they sometimes find themselves forced to endure ostracism that complicates their working lives, at least until they find a way to calm their colleagues’ worries. Co-workers often refuse to sit near infected people or to shake their hands. They avoid sharing the same telephones or toilet seats as their HIV-positive colleagues.
There may also be hostility from people who seemingly want to morally justify why a person has gotten a deadly disease.
“Suddenly, there are rumors not only about their health, but about other aspects of their life too,” said Norman Nickens, coordinator of the AIDS discrimination unit at the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. “Someone who was an excellent employee suddenly becomes a bad person.”
Those types of reactions are common even in Hollywood, where enlightened social attitudes are supposedly the norm. TV writer Burt Pearl, for instance, quickly noticed subtle changes around his office three years ago when he informed co-workers that he was infected with HIV.
He said people who previously had no qualms about barging into his office suddenly wouldn’t venture past the doorway anymore. No one would clean his coffee cup in the dishwasher. Co-workers stopped stealing his pencils, which Pearl had a habit of chewing on.
Pearl said after he educated his office mates on how the AIDS virus is transmitted, their skittishness subsided and life around the office returned to normal. But Pearl, who also conducts AIDS-in-the-workplace seminars, conceded that “society at large still has a long way to go in terms of understanding and being willing to accept the facts.”
For many HIV-infected workers, the prospect of losing their jobs and health insurance remains more worrisome than being shunned by colleagues. Some employers still blatantly violate civil rights law by firing or forcing out staffers known to be infected with HIV.
In other cases, employers have switched their insurance coverage to specifically limit the amount they will spend on health care for AIDS patients, putting them in financial peril.
Yet even at companies with the most benevolent managers, the hostility of co-workers is a major concern for the HIV-infected. Corporate attitudes don’t necessarily “move downward through the ranks,” said J Craig Fong, director of the Los Angeles office of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay and lesbian civil rights group.
“Although the corporation may dictate the benefits you get, the quality of your working life is not determined by the big boys on the top floor, but by the people you work next to,” Fong said.
Concerns about how co-workers will react, Fong said, prompt many HIV-infected employees to conceal their medical conditions as long as possible.
AIDS experts contend that the problem stems, in part, from most employers’ failure to educate their work forces about the ways HIV is transmitted and related AIDS issues. The National Leadership Coalition on AIDS, a Washington-based business and labor group, informally estimates that only 20% of U.S. employers have begun educational programs or have adopted other official policies for dealing with the disease.
People who run AIDS seminars sometimes are stunned by the misinformation they encounter in the workplace. At the San Francisco clothing store, some of the tailors expressed concerns that they somehow could get AIDS from using their sewing needles--even though their ailing co-worker never did any sewing.
Generally, the more people know about AIDS and HIV the less likely they are to fear contracting the virus in the workplace or through other casual contact. But exceptions to the rule abound.
For example, a 1988 survey of 3,460 employees found that 23% of the workers said they would be afraid of getting AIDS if one of their co-workers had the disease--even though only 2% said they actually believed that it was likely that HIV could be contracted that way.
In other words, even after receiving accurate information about AIDS, some workers cling to “irrational fear,” said Judith K. Barr, director of the survey and the research chief of the New York Business Group on Health, a nonprofit coalition.
At the same time, Barr said, “when you have co-worker concerns, it’s not necessarily that ‘I’m afraid of touching this person’ or that ‘I’m afraid of getting AIDS.’ ” Sometimes employees may simply resent or be worried about the extra work they will face when an AIDS patient misses time from work.
New apprehensions, however, apparently arose two years ago, when it was revealed that a Florida dentist with AIDS infected five of his patients, said David I. Schulman, supervising attorney of the city of Los Angeles’ AIDS/HIV discrimination unit.
Schulman maintains that people who had grown accustomed to the notion that the AIDS virus could be transmitted through sexual relations, blood transfusions or sharing hypodermic needles were alarmed that HIV, in extremely rare instances, could be spread other ways too. “It took a whole bunch of people who believed they were at zero risk of AIDS” and persuaded them that “they had some risk,” Schulman said. “They don’t care how infinitesimal that risk is.”
During the year after the Florida case emerged, he said, the volume of AIDS discrimination complaints received by the city--which had been declining--jumped from 51 to 84.
Still, AIDS counselors say there are hopeful signs in public attitudes. Nickens, the San Francisco official, tells the story of an ailing Sheriff’s Department employee in 1987 whose supervisor and co-workers sought to have him transferred partly because of their own fears of getting the disease.
About 18 months later, the Sheriff’s Department contacted Nickens again about the same employee. But this time, things were different. By then, the employee was too ill to continue in his job--but it took management a long time to find that out because his co-workers had been covering for him.
