THE AIDS pandemic is affecting every area of life in almost every country on the planet. Governments and institutions are scrambling to draft appropriate policies to deal with this unprecedented challenge. Policies have to struggle with human rights issues, the impact and cost of the disease, and the need to control its spread.Last Thursday the tri-partite Labour Advisory Committee (LAC) endorsed a draft of the National Workplace Policy on HIV/AIDS. The policy has been long in the making and was not approved without strong disagreement between two of the LAC partners, the Jamaica Employers' Federation (JEF), representing employers, and the Joint Confederation of Trade Unions (JCTU), representing workers. Government is the third partner.
The concerns of the employers' union and the workers' unions must necessarily reflect significant differences. Employers will have concerns about loss of productivity from illnesses and the costs associated with HIV/AIDS in the workplace; workers and their unions will have large concerns about discrimination in employment and promotion based on HIV status. Both sets of concerns have to find fair balance.
In some African countries where HIV infection rates exceed 25 per cent of the population and are disproportionately higher among the productive labour force, businesses and governments have been forced to calculate HIV/AIDS as an important factor in their operations. On purely economic grounds, the exclusion of infected persons from the workplace would be a disaster for the continued capacity to operate. The main bone of contention between the JEF and the JCTU is the HIV screening of potential employees and candidates for promotion. The trade unions see this as opening the door to employment discrimination. Jacqueline Lloyd, the executive director of JEF, argues that employers have always tested for various diseases and that employers need to know the HIV status of employees for management purposes. She pointed out the concrete example of increased health insurance costs to companies and to non-HIV employees when employees are tested positive.
At some stage, as the JEF executive director points out, HIV-infected persons are likely to have special health needs which will influence their particular deployment in an organisation. Public education and enlightened employment practices can help to lessen the personal stigma attached to HIV/AIDS. But policy should be careful not to wish away or seek to legislate away the considerable impact which the disease can have in the workplace and which will increase as cases multiply and which will require the most careful management.
We note, in support, that an ILO-backed International HIV/AIDS Workplace Education Programme is set to be launched on October 14. Public education is a necessity as we seek to draft a policy to benefit both the worker and the employer.
