When businesses scout the globe for the most inexpensive production facilities
and information technology centers, few consider how much an AIDS epidemic could
diminish the benefits of an offshore center’s initially low operating costs. For
too many companies, the incentive to invest in AIDS prevention becomes clear
only when the disease begins to show up in their workforces, as it has all over
sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to about two-thirds of the 40 million people
now infected with HIV worldwide.There have been some notable—and
laudatory—examples of large companies that have launched AIDS awareness and
treatment campaigns in high-risk countries. Anglo American is now operating the
first large-scale AIDS treatment program in South Africa. Standard Chartered
Bank spent $300,000 last year (or approximately $10 for each of its employees
world-wide) on a peer education and prevention campaign. Nike has started
to work with its major suppliers in Asia to ensure that employees have access to
potentially life-lifesaving information about HIV. Producers of Kenyan
tea and Malawi cotton, as well as the auto manufacturers with assembly plants in
South Africa, are well aware of the consequences of the HIV rampage. Many have
to hire three people for every vacant job position and are accustomed to having
10 percent of their staff absent every day. AIDS can come close to halting
productivity and cancelling out the efficiency in of initially low
operating costs. And because an AIDS-ridden population is an unemployed
population, it can destroy consumer markets. Yet when the World Economic
Forum, working with the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and
Harvard University, polled nearly 8,000 executives running operations in 103
different countries, fewer than six 6 percent indicated their companies had HIV
policies. Nearly half thought HIV was not likely to have a serious impact on the
communities in which their businesses operate. What is also cause for alarm is
that 36 percent of those questioned did not know how many of their employees
were infected with HIV.
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