Job Discrimination Suit Is Legacy of an AIDS Victim

SANTA BARBARA —  It was Christmas Eve two years ago when Joy Harris, a volunteer for Santa Barbara’s AIDS Task Force, got a call that College Hospital had admitted its first AIDS patient.

The woman Harris lives with, Anne Wood, hurriedly put together a Christmas stocking for the victim. Then, while Wood stayed home to cook the turkey on Christmas morning, Harris went to visit John Chadbourne, 33 at the time. He had no close family ties, and welcomed the chance to talk at length to Harris about such things as his illness and his hopes for the future--he had registered for law school at the University of Redlands.

That was the beginning of a relationship that was to extend beyond Chadbourne’s death from acquired immune deficiency syndrome on Jan. 6, 1985. Harris, nursing director for Santa Barbara County Health Care Services, recently attended an administrative hearing in Ventura in which the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing attempted to show that the Raytheon Co. in Goleta had discriminated against Chadbourne when it would not allow him to return to work after he was diagnosed as having AIDS.

It is apparently the first AIDS-related employment discrimination suit in the nation to reach the hearing stage. (A similar suit is pending in Broward County, Fla.) “He (Chadbourne) realized it might be too late to help himself, but that it wasn’t too late to help someone else. I told him I would be happy to continue the fight,” said Harris, whom Chadbourne named executrix of his estate.

Raytheon spokesman Frank Umanzio said: “We did not discriminate against John because he had AIDS. We did not introduce him to the workplace because he had a communicable disease.”

At issue in the hearing--which is to resume Jan. 6, the first anniversary of Chadbourne’s death--is whether employers have a right to bar AIDS victims from the workplace on the chance that the disease may be spread by casual contact.

May Set a Precedent

Attorney Peter Laura of the National Gay Rights Task Force--intervenors in the Chadbourne case--said that the decision on this case, which is expected to be handed down by the Fair Employment and Housing Commission in about three months, has the potential to affect every employer and every AIDS patient in the state. “It could be an important precedental decision,” Laura said. (Should the commission rule against Raytheon, the matter could be appealed in civil courts. The company said it hasn’t decided whether it would take the matter to court.)

Los Angeles, West Hollywood and San Francisco have passed city ordinances banning discrimination against AIDS victims; and on Nov. 14 the federal government released guidelines on management of AIDS in the workplace, indicating that no restrictions are necessary in most working situations because AIDS does not appear to be transmitted through casual contact.

But Laura said these measures alone probably will not be sufficient to prevent AIDS patients from losing their jobs. “Like with every other sort of discrimination, even though people can see it’s not just--it happens anyway,” he said. Laura said that attorneys at his law offices on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles have seen at least 10 other workers with complaints of employment discrimination because of AIDS.

Harris said that she could sympathize with the initial fears of Raytheon management because she had trepidations when she first invited Chadbourne to her home. Eventually, she and Wood were comfortable eating meals Chadbourne had prepared, and having him occasionally spend the night at their house when he was feeling especially ill. They even offered to let Chadbourne die at their home (he died in Cottage Hospital.)

Harris, 49, the mother of a 28-year-old daughter, said she volunteered to work with AIDS patients because she wanted to be able to educate her nursing staff about the illness. On a more personal level, she and Wood were concerned about the disease because they number several gay men among their friends. Wood, a former pediatric respiratory therapist who is unable to work because of epilepsy, said she was able to sympathize with Chadbourne’s dilemma because of having a lifelong medical problem that also carries stigma.

“Mothers in the neighborhood wouldn’t let their children play with me when I was little for fear I’d have a fit; and I had friends that wanted to drag me off to every tent revival in town to drive the demons out of me,” said Wood, 44. “I know what it’s like to live with discrimination.”

Raytheon spokesman Umanzio said that even though more is known today about AIDS than it was two years ago when the company made the decision not to reinstate Chadbourne, there is still enough uncertainty about how the illness is spread that it might come to the same decision if it were forced to again.

Cases Outside Risk Groups

That would be the proper course of action, according to Dr. Robert S. Mendelsohn, a physician in private practice in pediatrics and family medicine in Evanston, Ill. A well-known critic of certain accepted medical practices, Mendelsohn said at the hearing that employers have a right to be concerned because 6% of adults and 8% of children with AIDS (as described in the October FDA Drug Bulletin) fall outside recognized risk groups.

Because there is a chance that AIDS is transmitted in ways other than the known three--sexual contact, sharing of contaminated needles and transfusion of blood products--Mendelsohn recommends that all AIDS victims be quarantined, meaning, he said, that they should be restricted to “some form of isolation from the general public.” He said that an employer should be entitled to segregate a known AIDS patient from other employees. (Chadbourne’s job involved monitoring the manufacture of electronic equipment, work which required that he be in frequent contact with other people.)

Dr. Neil R. Schram, chairman of the Los Angeles City-County AIDS Task Force, was one of several prominent authorities on AIDS who testified at the hearing to the effect that the disease cannot be transmitted by casual contact. He cited studies showing that family members living with AIDS sufferers, as well as health care workers who are in close contact with patients, do not contract the virus. He said workplace contact is far less intimate than that between family members, or between health care workers and patients, and so the chance of transmitting the disease in an office or factory setting is negligible.

“If you were to put an AIDS virus on the table, I would not hesitate to put my finger on the table,” Schram said. His point was that even direct contact with the AIDS virus is not enough to spread the disease unless the person coming in contact with the virus has an open wound.

“I don’t have concern that this virus can be transmitted casually,” Schram said. “My area of concern is that we’re dealing with an agent we don’t know how to treat.” He said he is also concerned about the “terrible social stigma” and “terrible fears” engendered by the disease.

The information the company got from Chadbourne’s personal doctor when the patient returned from a prolonged hospitalization in early 1984 was “highly equivocal” as to the likelihood that Chadbourne could expose his co-workers to the disease, said Umanzio.

The company medical director called meetings with upper management to discuss “the extent to which we would be posing a health threat to other employees,” Umanzio said. “We felt if we exposed someone to this and they contracted it, we would be virtually condemning them to death.”

Department of Fair Employment and Housing staff attorney Gloria Barrios said, “They (Raytheon) kept throwing the ball back in John’s court saying: ‘Where is the evidence (that the disease can’t be spread)? Show us.’ ” Chadbourne spent many days while his health was declining Xeroxing morbidity and mortality reports and presenting them to Raytheon administration in an effort to convince them that his return to work would pose no threat to Raytheon’s 2,000 employees, Barrios said.

Hot Line Volunteer

During the period when he was not permitted to work at Raytheon, Chadbourne volunteered nearly full time with the Santa Barbara Gay and Lesbian Resource Center. He ran the AIDS hot line almost single-handedly, according to Harris. She said he took some solace from educating others about the AIDS-related fears and stigma mentioned by Schram.

Preparing His Case

“At first he really believed he was going to be able to prove to Raytheon there was no reason he couldn’t go back to work,” Harris said. “Then he started getting depressed. He was very independent and did not want to rely on anyone for anything. It just started to eat away at him that he was being treated like a leper.”

Harris said Chadbourne became obsessed with proving that Raytheon was wrong. As well as asking for back pay and compensatory damages (if awarded, the money will go to paying off Chadbourne’s debts; a portion will be donated to the AIDS Assistance and Counseling Program of Santa Barbara and to the National Gay Rights Advocates), Chadbourne wished to have Raytheon post a change of policy saying that it will not discriminate against employees on the basis of a handicap (AIDS).

Harris said that Chadbourne irritated some people because he was extremely opinionated about mistreatment of AIDS victims as well as a number of other topics. But at his funeral, Harris paid tribute to that very stubbornness by quoting from English poet John Milton. She paraphrased the passage: “The opinionated man is someone who makes us all think.”