HEALTH-BRAZIL: Workers’ Rights – Victims of HIV/AIDS

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 8 2003 (IPS) - Violations of the labour rights of people living with HIV, the AIDS virus, and the stiffening of eligibility requirements for social security coverage in Brazil make the conditions faced by HIV-positive people, especially women, even more difficult.

Violations of those rights are the most frequent cause of complaints received by the Health Ministry’s Coordinator of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and AIDS (CETSS), Cristina Cámara, who is in charge of that body’s relations with civil society and human rights issues, told IPS.

Brazilian legislation prohibits employers from sacking people because of their HIV-positive status, or discriminating against them in hiring, and guarantees them social security benefits. But it is usually necessary to ”take legal action to enforce the law,” said Cámara.

Many companies get around the law by keeping employees living with HIV on ”permanent leave” with pay, but deprived of the day- to-day contact with their co-workers and the dignity of working, a situation that hurts their self-esteem, said Cámara.

To defend human rights and promote prevention efforts, the CETSS is developing partnerships with non-governmental organisations and networks of HIV-positive people, as well as the Bar Association, Labour Ministry and International Labour Organisation.

In addition, cooperation with the business community is carried out through contact with the Business Council for AIDS Prevention, said Cámara.

Depriving people of their wages or pensions is ”cruel,” especially for ”AIDS widows,” who have lost their husbands to the disease, Beatriz Pacheco, a lawyer and activist with the Positive Citizens Network, made up of HIV-positive women who promote prevention, commented to IPS.

The widows, who become heads of households, are the victims of discrimination when they are most in need of income, she pointed out.

Pacheco, who was diagnosed with HIV five years ago, said the discrimination is especially severe in the southern city of Porto Alegre, where she works as an activist.

”The majority of the infected women we assist are poor domestics who work in cleaning,” and who are unorganised, which makes it difficult for them to defend their rights, she said.

Women whose partners die of AIDS live under the permanent suspicion that they also test positive for HIV. Cámara cited the case of one woman who was arrested and held in custody for several days in a city in the northwestern state of Acre just because her husband had died of AIDS.

Activists say dismissals of women living with HIV are probably numerous among domestics, who total around five million in this country of 170 million, and the great majority of whom work without labour contracts, legal protection or social benefits.

Nevertheless, the Union of Domestics of Campinas, a city of around one million located 100 kms from Sao Paulo, has only received two complaints of dismissals of women living with HIV, Ana Simeao, the union’s director of legal affairs and a former president of the National Federation of Domestic Workers, noted in a conversation with IPS.

It is possible that there are few complaints because domestics tend to be unaware of their rights and do not generally fight to ensure they are respected, she said, adding that few domestics even join the union.

But another explanation, she said, may be the prejudice among the workers themselves towards people with HIV/AIDS, and their fear of social stigma, since there is a completely different attitude, for example, towards repetitive strain injuries, in connection with which many complaints are filed with the union.

One of the women who brought a complaint in Campinas had been sacked merely on the suspicion that she had AIDS. Although an AIDS test proved that she was not infected, that did not keep her from losing her job. But she did not want to go to court to sue for damages, said Simeao.

Prejudice and ignorance led the woman’s employers to ban her from touching anything in the kitchen in her last days at work, out of fear of contagion, said the labour activist.

Pacheco said workers living with HIV are also the victims of an ”unfair” tightening of the National Social Security Institute’s requirements for eligibility for benefits like paid leave and retirement and disability pensions.

The INSS doctors who carry out the evaluations of workers are not specialists in infectious diseases, are unfamiliar with the serious effects of the opportunistic infections suffered by HIV/AIDS patients, and only consider physical ailments like blindness and motor difficulties as impediments to working, the lawyer pointed out.

The INSS doctors do not understand the significance of psychological problems in people who are ”physically, but not emotionally, capable of working,” she explained.

Pacheco said she knew of cases of HIV-positive workers suffering from panic syndrome who were not deemed eligible for disability coverage by the INSS.

Although violations of labour and social security rights affect all people living with HIV, women tend to suffer a greater impact because they also face social and labour discrimination based on their gender, which makes them even more vulnerable, she pointed out.

By demanding respect for their labour and social security rights, as well as treatment with antiretroviral drugs – which delay the onset of full-blown AIDS – that is adapted to their specific gender-related needs, women living with HIV are fighting for their ”right to a high-quality life,” said Pacheco.

Brazil’s Health Ministry provides antiretroviral drugs free of charge to around 115,000 people living with HIV, through a programme that has drawn praise at the international level. But the drugs ”were created for men, and do not address the specific problems of women,” in whom they trigger serious side effects, said Pacheco.