Aiding The Shopfloor

The most terrifying example of how AIDS can be an economic threat is of the Ugandan coffee industry in which the entire productive workforce was wiped out. "Instances like this have close relevance to Indian industry due to the similarity of socio-economic and cultural factors which define the spread of AIDS," says Anupama Mohan, manager at Delhi-based Siel Ltd.

On a macro level, research has shown that if AIDS is not controlled, its costs could eventually consume the entire medical budget of a country. "This could imply increased taxes as the Government turns to the business community and employed workforce for funds. It would also mean lower purchasing power in the hands of consumers in the long-run. That would affect any company's market," says David Logan, president of US-based Corporate Citizenship International. "Businessmen can no longer take the view that the disease belongs to the domain of their employees' private lives," says P. Ratnam, director, CII. "Corporates must educate people about the costs and risks involved."

But AIDS in the workplace throws up thorny issues that go beyond mere business practices. Indian corporate response till now has varied from outright denial to taking impulsive action arising out of misconceptions.

?Happily, the first battle cries are becoming audible. In companies like Escorts, Eicher, Glaxo, Larsen & Toubro, Ranbaxy and Wesman Engineering, AIDS awareness campaigns are being built into health and family welfare programmes. United Distillers and ICICI have funded research and worker education programmes. Godrej & Boyce and Siel Ltd have offered field sites for research into sexual behavior patterns among industrial workers. Godrej & Boyce and L&T have even rehabilitated workers in keeping with non-discriminatory policies towards the HIV-infected.

In March, the CII is formally launching an advocacy package for senior management that deals with the issues AIDS brings into the workplace, how they can be best addressed, the social and economic impact of the epidemic and existing cost-benefit analyses of intervention programming.

A second package—Options for Action—consists of strategies that companies can choose from to tackle the incidence of AIDS among workers. "It is based on the cafeteria approach so that each company can choose from the range of options available on how it would like to integrate the programme into its cost-benefit structure," says Mohan. The range available includes communication material like posters and entertainment-information audio and video cassettes, building condom programming into family welfare programmes and providing sexually transmitted diseases services to arrest the spread of AIDS.

?"The workplace is the most appropriate place to raise questions about AIDS because employees are in effect a captive audience and are most receptive to the influence of supervisors, co-workers and employers," says Lucia Ferraz-Tabor, advisor with ICICI who has been working on AIDS projects in South-East Asia. "More so in a country like ours where talking about sex is taboo even while about four to five people in every 1,000 are likely to be infected by the virus by the turn of the centur y," adds Bhalla.

To take the programme further, the CII is developing a training module and plans to groom facilitators to ensure that it becomes a self-sustaining activity. "The packages will also be followed up with a monitoring of the extent of intervention in the company," says Ratnam.

Clearly then, Indian industry has begun the battle. And even if it is too early to say what kind of concrete results and savings the pro-active programme will achieve, it's a task well-begun.?