Alone Photo: Eredel on deviantART
As a manager of a homelessness shelter in Queensland, Cara* first suspected a problem with management about two months after she left on sick leave to start her treatment for Stage IV esophageal cancer.
After a short period at work, she was surprised to experience subtle forms of shunning. Attempts to initiate dialogue merely exacerbated the issue, with her management committee failing to respond to emails requesting confirmation of when she could return to work.
“It was like, ‘What’s going on here?’” she says.
The nasty surprises continued for weeks.
“Then I had some contact with some of the [other] staff, and they implied the woman who was doing my job was sort of saying that I wasn’t coming back.”
Nor did it stop there. When Cara went into remission after a couple of months of treatment and eventually returned to work, things became more challenging.
“I heard from other staff as well that they’d overheard talk they were looking at offering me a lower position. At this point I contacted Fair Work Australia,” she says. “They were trying to make me come back part-time and I said, ‘I don’t need to come back part-time’.
Cara’s experience, although shocking, is by no means unique in workplaces around Australia. Australian cancer survivorship rates have been trending upwards in recent years to the point where more than 60 per cent of people diagnosed with cancer will survive the five-year post-diagnosis period.
The proportion of survivors in Australia is amongst the highest globally, with statistics showing two-thirds of new diagnoses survive treatment. We are progressively leading the way compared to the world’s average of 42 per cent, Western Europe’s 62 per cent and North America’s 38 per cent.
This means there are more survivors walking amongst us than ever before. Yet in the Western world, a cancer diagnosis, or even the word ‘cancer’, still strikes fear and loathing deep in society’s soul. For many, cancer in a friend or colleague can lead to worries about their own existential fears, conjuring strong angst not just for the patient but also for those around them.
The illness can inflict itself on any of us without discrimination but a diagnosis can also lay bare a veil of prejudice and stigma within our society. For centuries, public attitudes of unacceptability, shame and stigma due to illness have long been recognised.
Today, an experience of cancer for some survivors can mean facing a battle of a different kind: social and economic discrimination. In particular, this can manifest itself in the form of discrimination in the workplace fort those trying to re-enter the job market, or returning to their workplace after recovering from cancer.
“We do hear about employment issues where people feel they are personally discriminated against,” says Annie Miller, manager of the Survivorship Unit at the NSW Cancer Council.
“It could be quite a large discrimination issue where their job description has changed while they’ve been on leave and they feel like they’ve been pushed out of an organisation; or an organisation has declined leave, or not allowed them to take time off to attend appointments. So there’s varying degrees of discrimination.”
There is the hope that in time cancer will become a manageable disease but until this occurs, some public attitudes are likely to remain. The question is, when will public consciousness catch up with the advancements in cancer research and treatments?
For recovered people who experience either subtle or blatant workplace prejudice, it increases the stress associated with their illness causing further anxiety around issues of personal identity, relationships, their social life and economic opportunities.
Cara’s experience represents the severe end of the discrimination stick. As well as questioning her abilities, her employers demanded she re-do her work to a better standard. They requested this courtesy of some company minutes circulated around the office.
“They had a list of grievances against me on it – you know, pathetic things,” she says. “They’d ask me to do a report on something which I had done but it wasn’t how they’d wanted it. They wanted me to re-do it. It was petty grievances, nothing substantial, nothing you could actually dismiss somebody for.”
But months later she was on the receiving end of a full-blown disciplinary action. Cara took a letter that listed vague grievances against her to her solicitor who helped draft a response. The organisation quickly went into damage control.
“I basically asked for specifics and I got back a letter retracting the fact that it was ever a disciplinary, it had never [being meant to] come across that way. They just wanted to meet me informally to discuss some issues and so, again my solicitor helped me respond and she said, ‘you need to quote from that first letter about the disciplinary because you need to be saying to them ‘you can’t just go along changing your mind every five minutes’.”
For Cara, the experience took its emotional toll. “There were times where I felt I had to look for another job and leave,” she says. “How much more of this can I take? I felt quite down and quite stressed… you don’t sleep as well. Whenever I knew there was a management meeting coming up, [I was] thinking, ‘What are they going to do this week?’, or ‘What tack are they going to use this time?’”
Although Cara’s case is disturbing, the Cancer Council’s Annie Miller says it is the exception rather than the norm.
“We don’t have people ringing us saying how wonderful my workplace is; we have people that will call us with their concerns”, she says. “We could err on the side of, ‘We get quite a few calls about this’, but in the big picture, we might only be hearing about some of the tough cases – we’re not hearing about the workplaces that are really doing the right thing.”
Yet the task of broadening the horizons of workplace attitudes clearly remains a work-in-progress.
The rights of cancer patients to continue their professional life without anxiety points to the need for a shift in the way some workplaces think about people who have experienced cancer. To the extent that a diagnosis of cancer can cause secondary social pressures such as marriage breakdown, loss of friends, or becoming socially reclusive, the politics of work discrimination can impair the wallet of the survivor and dishearten them in the long term.
There is no concrete evidence to prove how common cancer discrimination is in the workplace but addressing the issue in the public sphere and helping cancer patients and survivors cope with negative behaviour at work would provide an opportunity to support them more responsibly and ethically.
For people like Cara, it would mark an important step in repairing trust shredded by her employers.
“There were times, it was like, ‘I can’t believe they’re in the caring industry themselves and this is how they’re treating people’,” she says. “It just makes you wonder how they’re treating their clients if this is how they’re treating their work colleagues.”
*Names have been changed to protect people’s privacy
