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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Building trust in order to fight HIV/AIDS in an indutrial setting
| Panel |
39. Livelihood, Vulnerability and Health. Moving beyond existing frameworks
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| Paper ID | 205 |
| Author(s) |
Hayem, Judith
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | As HIV/AIDS hit badly South Africa in the mid-90's and impacted on the whole Industry, some big mining companies started prevention programs. Since 2001, some of them even offered testing and free anti-retroviral therapy to their HIV+ employees. But these programs proved difficult to implement in a context where the legacy of apartheid still weighs on industrial relations, creating mistrut and fear of discrimination or repatriation amongst the workers.
On the basis of an anthropological fieldwork conducted in the Mpumalanga mines in summer 2005 - which follows a first study conducted in the same province in 2001 - this paper examines how 'trust' has been reinstaured between management and workers so as to make prevention and care effective. Thanks to participant observation and interviews conducted both with doctors, nurses, managers and employees, I was able to understand how prevention programs and care were organised, dealt with and adapted in order to come to an end with the fears of the workers and reach outstanding results : 90% of the workforce in the studied mine came voluntarily for testing and most of the workers under treatments are back to work whereas initially nobody would test and most of the people still denied the reality of the disease.
What happened in the meantime? Was does it mean for mineworkers to trust management on that issue? What change of minds does the success of such a program imply on both sides ? Is HIV/AIDS a political issue at work and if yes what does overcoming mistrust says about the handling of post-apartheid era in industrial settings? What are the pros and cons of private companies giving away treatment to their employees and lastly what lessons can we learn from the studied situation in order to implement them elsewhere in Africa or other continents? Here are the questions I intend to deal with in that paper. |
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