Dated: 12 November 2003
Even though the government has not yet made it mandatory for the business sector to have an HIV/AIDS policy in place, they are nevertheless being advised to have broad-based programmes which address issues of prevention, treatment, care and support. With the flow of information that is now available about HIV/AIDS, it is now possible to redesign employee benefits to use the resources at hand to target the needs of workers without a significant increase in contributions. A workplace environment should be safe for employees should they wish to disclose their HIV status or come forward for company assistance.
Whether this is being done in present day Jamaica, there is not much statistics to support this practice. However, as the HIV/AIDS public awareness programme continues by the various agencies, information is now beginning to come to the fore that a great many companies are now secretly medically examining potential employees in an effort to keep their workplace free of HIV/AIDS suspects or victims.
No one seems brave enough to come forward and report such cases of discrimination, except for Dr. Nancy George, Chairperson of the HIV/AIDS Steering Committee for UTech, who disclosed in an interview with the Businessuite that she knows of at least one such company that is secretly screening potential employees.
Due to the sensitivity and confidentiality of the situation, and without fingering the offending company, Dr. George reportedly overheard a discussion where a senior human resource person of a leading local company talking how they had refused to hire students from UTech who were tested positive for HIV.
"This summer when the students filled out their application forms," Dr. George explained, "the students were asked to do a health check-up, inclusive of a blood tests, as part of the recruitment process. For those students whose tests that came back HIV positive, this company has refused to hire them. What makes the matter worse, was the fact that the company HR person tol the students the they weren’t hired was because they had tested positive for HIV.
"No matter how you look on it, this was a terrible thing to have done to those students. First of all, how can you tell a young person in a job interview that he or she is HIV positive and that was the reason why you weren’t hiring them, especially when the job has nothing to do with healthcare and health nothing at all? I won’t go too far, but it was summer employment that involves customer service work and there was no reason why somebody HIV positive could not have done that job.
"What needs pointing out here also is that the students weren’t even made aware that they were being tested for HIV. Now, if you were going to test someone for HIV, the proper thing to do would be to inform the individual that you’d be doing so. If you don’t think you are doing something wrong, why do it in secret?"
To not offer someone employment because that person is tested positive for HIV/AIDS, is certainly an infringement of one’s basic human rights. But in a situation as described above, do you think anybody in that situation is going to complain.
Dr. George said they wouldn’t, and that’s exactly what those UTech students had done. "We are hoping that some of those young people are going to turn up here (UTech’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Exhibition) this afternoon and find out that there is no stigma and that the action of that company was an aberration. In fact, being HIV positive isn’t even a death sentence anymore. It is just a very expensive disease to have. You can now stay alive for years, but the problem is the cost of the anti-retroviral drugs. Even though it is not the death sentence that it once was, it still has incredible implications for our workforce, our businesses and the future development of the economy and the country.”
In response to Dr. George’s lament that there is no policy from the government to guide the workplace, Ministry of Labour’s Local Technical Assistant, Gail Hoad, explained that this Ministry was spearheading the HIV/AIDS Work Place Policy Committee with two other agencies, namely the Jamaica Employers Federation (JEF) and the trade unions.
She said her ministry was working on a draft that will provide guidelines for all employers and employees in Jamaica. "Other countries have developed their workplace policy, but we are working on developing ours now. It will provide guidelines for both employer and employees as to how to deal with HIV/AIDS. It will address things like discrimination, stigmatization, the fact that HIV/AIDS is a life threatening illness in which the person may be able to work sometimes but may not be able to work at other times, how does the employer deals with that? And when the final separation comes about when the person is physical unable to work because the progression of HIV has developed into full-blown AIDS, what the employer can do and what the employee’s is entitled to," she said.
Arguing that the Ministry of Labour was one of five key line ministries that falls under the National HIV/STI Action Plan, Ms. Hoad said it was particularly concerned with HIV/AIDS in the workplace, and noting that the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has developed a set of guidelines about HIV/AIDS and the World of Work, thus recognizing the impact of HIV/AIDS on the world of Work.
"The fact that HIV/AIDS negatively affects the productive sector, if affected people who are in their working years, in the Caribbean for example they are 15-45 years old," she argued, "those are the people who are primarily hard hit by the disease, and CARICOM has recognized this as well. So what the ministry is doing is trying to mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS at the workplace and to prevent HIV/AIDS through either education or sensitization programmes."
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