AIDS Education Proves a Tough Sell
Mark King, an AIDS educator, makes his living by walking into corporate boardrooms full of hostile executives with their arms crossed.
“They’re afraid they are going to see condoms. They are afraid they are going to see explicit sexuality,” said King, who has the virus that causes AIDS. “People have a vision of anyone involved in AIDS as being ultra-liberal and filled with all sorts of agendas.”
Whether it’s because of fear, ignorance or just a lack of interest, AIDS education is still struggling to get a foot in the door of corporate America.
Four years ago, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched Business Responds to AIDS, a program to make it easy for companies to teach employees the basics of AIDS and how to live with it on the job. The CDC says about one in six businesses across the country have actually started a program.
Education is one of the five goals of the program. It also tells companies how to write policies that spell out employees’ rights and the companies’ legal responsibilities. And it tell them how to start AIDS education for employees’ families and get involved in AIDS charity work.
But a CDC study of 2,252 businesses in 1995 found they were more apt to write a policy and promote philanthropy than start education. It found 43% of those businesses had a written policy and 46% encouraged their employees to get involved with AIDS and HIV service groups.
“Policy is safe and it’s pragmatic,” said King, who has conducted seminars on AIDS at banks, hotels and law firms. “It doesn’t mean you’re going to have to talk about it. A policy stuck in an employee manual doesn’t do anyone any good.”
A policy also “doesn’t require the same level of time commitment that a class engaging all of your employees would mean,” said Angie Hammock, who directs the CDC’s program.
Some companies have taken the lead. Daka International, the Danvers, Mass., company that runs Fuddruckers restaurants, has required its 23,000 employees to learn about AIDS since 1988 after an employee married a man with HIV. Co-workers shunned her and customers boycotted the deli where she worked.
The company includes pamphlets on AIDS and HIV in employees’ orientation packets and distributes them at training workshops. Daka also set up an anonymous AIDS hotline staffed by people outside the company that directs callers to testing labs and counselors.
“The more frank you are about the disease, the less of a stigma it is,” said William H. Baumhauer, Daka’s chairman and chief executive. “If the CEO says it’s OK to talk about it, it sends a powerful message.”
But some businesses just aren’t ready to talk about it.
“Companies have so many other things on their table,” said Barry Lawrence, spokesman for the Alexandria, Va.-based Society for Human Resource Management, a national group of personnel managers.
“They have profit margins to worry about, they have sexual harassment, diversity concerns. There’s so much vying for their attention.”
Mark Barnes, a New York City lawyer and former AIDS lobbyist, said some companies simply don’t want to mention a sexually transmitted disease at the conference table.
“There still can be a lot of moral and religiously based resistance in the workplace,” said Barnes. “I would not understand why you would need to show in the workplace the use of a condom, but there’s no reason that anyone should have a moral objection to simply knowing the facts.”
The promise of powerful new drugs that halt the progress of the AIDS virus and make patients look and feel better may give managers the idea it’s no longer an issue they should worry about.
“In 1997, it doesn’t appear to be as big of a problem,” King said. “Companies will say, ‘Oh yeah, isn’t there a cure for that now or something?’ Don’t they have drugs to treat it now?’ ”
BellSouth Corp. in Atlanta adopted an AIDS policy in 1989 and has had no reason to go beyond that, spokeswoman Gaye Clark said. The policy defines AIDS, explains how it is spread and outlines employees’ right to privacy.
“We didn’t see the need for mandatory classes,” Clark said. “The company decided to handle individual cases as they bubbled up. It’s been working very well.”
Only about half the time does King reveal that he has HIV. And he never displays a condom. “I can sometimes get through an entire class without saying the word,” he said.
“I tell them that when I am done with them I don’t expect them to become an activist or write to their congressman or march in a gay rights parade,” King said. “This is about the law and their workplace.”
