Anglo American in South Africa

Chapter 5 Case Analysis: Anglo American in South Africa

Executive Summary

Anglo American PLC, which is a mining business that operates in 61 via eight key businesses, was founded in 1917 as the Anglo American Corp. of South America and now the headquarters are in London. Anglo American is the largest producer of gold in the world. It has a South African workforce of about 90,000 employees in its primary operations and about 44,000 spread across is subsidiaries, the firm is one of the, if not the largest in the region. Affected heavily by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the company was the first to establish a strategy to combat the damaging effects of the disease on its workforce and systems. Joined by many other MNEs, Anglo American also became a part of the Global Business Council on HIV/AIDS which main goals are to protect and treat the workers who may be infected. In 2001 the company announced that it would start running a fair study to determine whether it would make antiretroviral treatments available to the workforce. Just a year after the breaking news announcement, the company decided to abandon the study citing risks and expenses as the reasons. The company did state it would not abandon the idea or study in its entirety.

Questions

1. What choices does the government of South Africa have in the face of the HIV/AIDS epidemic? What do you think it should do?

As stated, South Africa suffers one of the largest and highest rates of HIV infections on the planet (Approximately 5.3 million cases in a population of 45 million people). As the days pass, another 1,500 South African people are infected with the virus. Despite this, the South African government seems to be doing little to provided resources and intervention. Very little of their budget has been spent to help out and the biggest reason is because of the cost and level of difficulty. The government needs to develop some kind of health care system and bring in the necessary resources to help the...