HIV carriers still suffer job discrimination (2)

According to the law, an employer has to inform the applicant in writing if he or she does not meet the related requirements.

The local education bureau took an aggressive attitude to Xiao before he filed a lawsuit against it.

"At the very beginning, officials either hung up the phone or warned that they would never give compensation to Xiao, regardless of whether we took legal measures or not," Zhang said.

They softened their attitude following mediation, Zhang said.

Zhang was asked by the court to hold discussions with representatives of the local education bureau twice in late November. Zhang proposed the education bureau give compensation or find Xiao alternative employment.

The latter idea was rejected by officials from the education bureau. "Parents would not send their kids to our school if they knew we had a teacher with AIDS, and other teachers might be reluctant to work with an AIDS patient," Wan Xiaolan, the Party secretary of the local education bureau, said.

From a humanitarian perspective, Wan said, the education bureau decided to provide compensation for Xiao.

Xiao and the county's education bureau reached an agreement after several rounds of fierce discussions. It was announced by the court on December 27 that a consensus had been reached..

Under the agreement, Xiao agreed to withdraw his lawsuit against the county's education bureau, while the bureau would pay 45,000 yuan to him in compensation.

Xiao felt comforted by the result. "No AIDS patients who sought compensation for employment discrimination have ever won their cases before, and I thought I had been lucky enough to get compensation," Xiao said.

Xiao gave the compensation to his parents so that they could pay for their pension fund.

Discrimination problem

Out of a population of over 1.3 billion, China has an estimated 780,000 people living with HIV/AIDS.

HIV employment discrimination remains a significant problem. "Despite the fact that HIV is transmitted through limited and established channels, many people are unwilling to work with people living with HIV/AIDS," Cheng Yuan, member of Tianxiagong, told the Global Times.

According to a survey in 2007, 65 percent of employers would discriminate against people with HIV. Another survey published in the Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology found that 90 percent of participants had lost their jobs at least once as a result of their HIV status.

Working opportunities for AIDS sufferers remain scarce, Cheng said. "It is impossible for them to work in hospitals, governments, schools or large-scale companies. They mainly work in privately-run companies where they can hide their condition," Cheng said.

Previously, it was commonplace for job discrimination lawsuits to be rejected by Chinese courts before even going to trial. It was only in August 30, 2010, that China's first-ever lawsuit was accepted by an Anhui provincial court for employment discrimination against a man on the grounds that he was HIV-positive.

Xiao Wu (a pseudonym), who applied for a teaching post in Anqing, Auhui Province, was rejected by the local education bureau after he was also found to be HIV-positive.

The local court ruled that the local education bureau had not been at fault in turning down Xiao Wu, as the Physical Examination Criteria for Recruitment of Civil Servants stated that people with infectious diseases, including venereal diseases and AIDS, are disqualified from becoming civil servants.