Revealing research on the South African Automotive Sector’s response to HIV/Aids shows that the country’s component supplier community does not consider HIV/Aids as a threat to their business.
Revealing research on the South African Automotive Sector’s response to HIV/Aids shows that the country’s component supplier community does not consider HIV/Aids as a threat to their business.
The study – one of the first of its kind based exclusively on the South African automotive sector – was commissioned by German development company InWent and conducted by the Automotive Industry Development Centre (AIDC) at over 100 component manufacturing companies in five provinces. AIDC Project Manager, Sibo Camagu said the survey showed that industry did not fully grasp the consequences of HIV/Aids on the sector.
“Only 3% of respondents said their investment decisions were impacted by HIV/ Aids, 77% did not research the impact of HIV/Aids on production costs and 74% did not research the impact of HIV/Aids on the labour force,” Camagu said.
Camagu said it stood to reason that generally the supplier community did not know the impact of HIV/Aids on their business because only 39% of companies had voluntary testing programmes and almost half of those could only encourage less than 45% of their employees to know their status.
HIV/Aids international expert Martin Weihs said productivity and profitability are core concerns for enterprises, large and small. “Aids weakens the economic activity by squeezing productivity, adding cost, diverting productive resources, and depleting skills.
A proper response to HIV/Aids not only makes business sense, it is the most humane thing to do,” Weihs said. “To a large extent, companies believe that they have addressed Aids if they have a policy filed somewhere but it is clear that companies need to do so much more to reduce their business risk to the disease.
“It is also not enough understanding who or how many are infected but also who and how many are affected by carrying the burden of family members with HIV/ Aids.
Most people who carry heavy domestic worries into the workplace are never going to be as focussed and effective as those without these issues,” Weihs said.
