United Press International - Tuesday, 26 June 2001
Richard Ale

The automotive giant joins AOL Time Warner, Bristol Myers Squibb, Calvin Klein and The Coca-Cola Company, among others.

The announcement was made Tuesday at a meeting of the Global Business Council on HIV and AIDS following talks between council members and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the second day of a three-day special session on HIV/AIDS.

William Roedy, who is president of MTV Networks International and the group's chairman, also announced that Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been named president and chief executive officer of the group.

"We fight wars, we engage in peacekeeping; we should engage in this fight as well," Holbrooke said.

Calling AIDS, "the worst health crisis in 700 years," Holbrooke said that until now, the aggregates response" of business to it has been "grossly inadequate."

That will change, he said.

"Business has the power to reach every person on Earth," Holbrooke said.

Roedy added that while AIDS "sets unique challenges for society," business has demonstrated that "it can bring unique strengths to bear on those challenges."

Stressing that the GBC will "work independently of the government," Roedy said that the top priority of the group will be "not to raise money" for the global AIDS fund, but to recruit as many businesses as possible.

He lauded some companies such as MAC Cosmetics, Unilever, and Standard Union Bank as leading the business response to curbing the disease.

DaimlerChrysler, which has a large South African operation, has been "a pioneer" in working to curb AIDS, beginning in 1996 with a policy of "work place tolerance" for victims, a company spokesman said.

Roedy and Holbrooke made clear that AIDS has an adverse impact on business, affecting employers, consumers and employees. "It has definitely had an impact on the bottom line," Roedy said.

Wherever the disease has spread, costs to business have risen, both in terms of people and shrinking labor and customer markets, he said. It also causes absenteeism, staff turnover, skill shortages, lower morale and more recruitment, and raises insurance costs.

In fact, if current trends continue, by the year 2020, the total workforce of 15 countries will have shrunk by 2.5 million people as a result of AIDS according to the U.N.'s International Labor Office, said Roedy.

As a first step, the GBC has devised an online questionnaire that enables a company to estimate the impact of HIV and AIDS in different countries. The questionnaire, developed with the Futures Group, will be online this September. The company will provide basic information about its workforce and some related costs, and the system will then factor what is known about the epidemic in that country and predict the company's costs over a fixed period if positive action isn't taken.

Attacking AIDS "is something we cannot afford not to do," Holbrooke said.

Other members of the GBC include Levi Strauss, Molson, Odebrecht, American International Insurance, Eskom, Volkswagen do Brazil, and ChevronTexaco.

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