Dignity, Human Rights and Business as a possible reality - Michael Posner

Many believe that business success and human dignity are mutually exclusive — but what if they’re not? 

Michael Posner’s life’s work proves otherwise. With over four decades at the forefront of human rights and corporate responsibility, he shares how organizations can create real economic value while respecting human rights — transforming how the world thinks about business and morality.In this episode, discover how a young lawyer's impulse to take action led to groundbreaking shifts in policy and corporate practice across the globe. Michael recounts pivotal moments, from the fight against Idi Amin’s atrocities in Uganda to shaping the legal framework for refugees in the US. 

His story is a masterclass in seizing opportunities, forming strategic alliances, and turning moral conviction into tangible progress. You'll learn about key initiatives like the Fair Labor Association, the importance of multi-stakeholder collaboration, and innovative approaches to supply chain integrity. Michael emphasizes that meaningful change is possible when we combine pragmatic listening, strategic positioning, and a relentless focus on accountability. He challenges long-held assumptions, showing how businesses can thrive by doing good—particularly in a polarized, complex world where the true levers of influence often go unnoticed.

Why does it matter? Because ignoring this potential risks sustaining harmful practices while missing out on exponential opportunities for social impact and long-term success. In a time of crises—climate, inequality, technological upheaval—the ability to align profit with principle isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s a strategic necessity. This is essential listening for business leaders, students, and anyone eager to see proof that responsible business isn’t just a utopian ideal but a practical, proven pathway to a better future. Michael’s insights on how to cultivate trust, turn adversity into opportunity, and influence global change will leave you inspired—and ready to act.

Michael Posner is a globally recognized thought leader on business and human rights. His leadership at Human Rights First, in the Obama Administration, at NYU’s Center for Business and Human Rights and his work influencing corporate standards make him a definitive voice at the intersection of purpose and profit. Ready to challenge what you think business can be? 

Hit play, and prepare to see how reality often proves possibility.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

This is reality approves possibility, an exploration of human ingenuity. Welcome. This is Reality Proves Possibility, and I'm honored to be here with Michael Posner, one of the world's leading voices at the intersection of business, human rights, and corporate responsibility. For more than four decades, Michael has challenged the fundamental assumption of modern capitalism that business success and human dignity are somehow intention. As Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor under President Obama, as the longtime leader of human rights first, and as the founder of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University's Stern School, he has worked tirelessly to demonstrate that responsible business is not only possible, it is necessary. Michael's work has influenced global corporations, governments, civil society organizations, and helps shape how companies think about labor rights, supply chains, technology, and their responsibilities to the people whose lives they affect. What I'm particularly excited about is that relevant to reality proofs possibility conversation, he represents a growing movement that refuses to accept this false choice between profit and principle. And through practical examples and decades of experience, Michael, you have shown that organizations can create economic value while respecting human rights and advancing human dignity. So I thank you for reminding us that this is what we're talking about. It's not a utopian dream. Around the world, leaders and organizations are already proving that business can be a force for human flourishing. So thank you so much, Michael, for joining here today. And my first question is always like reality proves possibility. We can do better than this. What's your reaction to the title of the show?

SPEAKER_02 2:11

Well, first of all, I'm delighted to be with you. And this is an important topic. We live at a time when I think too many people have sort of given up hope, or they live in a kind of world where they react to things in the news that make them sad and depressed, but they don't do anything about it. Out of adversity comes opportunity. And we are uh there are many, many opportunities now for people of goodwill to actually make a difference. They just need to fix on something that needs to be addressed. They need to be practical about how to do it, and they need to have the optimism, as I do, I'm a chronic optimist, that you actually can make a difference if you identify allies, work in a constructive way. Don't assume you're going to reach perfection. I live by the 80% rule, where when I hit 80%, I declare victory. But there are many, many opportunities, including with the business world, to think differently about what's really possible and what's necessary. Too many businesses, I think, if we're talking about business in particular, are operating under a sort of false assumption based on Milton Friedman 50 years ago saying the only thing that business needs to do is to maximize financial returns to shareholders in the next three months. If that's your assumption, then change is almost impossible. But in fact, our economy is flourishing, certainly at the high end, the stock market is through the roof. And there are many, many companies that are highly profitable and could be doing a lot better by having a longer-term view and simply recognizing they have a responsibility to society as well as to short-term shareholders. So that's my premise. That's why we started the Center for Business and Human Rights, the first human rights center at a business school 13 years ago. And I really think we're making promise progress because we've recognized that the reality is uh uh that change is possible.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Yeah. That's quite impressive. And I I'm I'm I'm uh excited by your storied career also. And and I want to go back to how you made some of the choices early on, because I think some of our listeners are in the position to make these choices for themselves right now. You went to law school, right? And it may not have been, and maybe you can share a little bit, the most typical career path to go into human rights at that time, right? And and I think there's lots of corporate law opportunities, et cetera. And so what drove you and what what made you study law? And and how were you able to uphold and create a career for yourself that I think is not you forged a path. It wasn't there.

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Well, I guess the first thing I would say is I didn't have a career plan when I was in law school or in college. I had a sense of privilege. I my father was a successful lawyer. You know, I I I didn't I I didn't have struggles as a young person. And I s and and I also had a sense from my parents. My my father, among other things, worked as a w in what was then, I guess you'd call now an environmental lawyer. He helped preserve the lakefront beaches and parks in Chicago against a rush of developers who wanted to build every square inch of the lakefront. That was a 25-year battle. So I saw in practice what it meant to be both, you know, successful in the world and to give something back. So that's sort of what drove me to law school. When I went to law school, I thought, well, you know, I I probably ought to at least get a little experience being a real lawyer in a law firm. I did that for two and a half years, but I was always pretty clear that I wanted to do something in the public area. And the idea of international human rights never dawned on me. But in my second year of law school, I had a terrific professor, I was at the University of California, Berkeley, who said, I was very young. I went to law school, I was the youngest person in my class, and I thought I need to take some time off and see the world. So he's this is a man named Frank Newman, said, Why don't you go and work for a human rights group in Geneva? You can both see the world, get law school credit, and learn something. And so I went to work for a group called the International Commission of Jurists, who were preparing a report on Idi Amin in Uganda. This was in the 1970s. When I got this assignment, I literally had to go to an atlas to find Uganda on the map. I didn't know anything. And over the course of eight months, I interviewed more than a hundred Ugandans, some living in Africa. I wasn't allowed into Uganda, but many in Europe. And I realized, you know, this was a modern genocide or catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of people had been killed. I didn't know anything about it, and there is very little about it in the press. And so it said to me, My gosh, you know, I live in this bubble, in this world, you know, of privilege in the United States, and this is going on, and we don't even pay attention to it. So that really sparked the interest. And um it turned out, again, you look for possibility. We wrote a report, I wrote a report, which we submitted to the U.N., but it also found some uh welcoming uh members of U.S. Congress, uh Mark Hatfield, who is a Republican senator from Oregon, Don Pease, who is a Democratic Congressman from Ohio, introduced legislation uh to basically bar products from Uganda from coming into the United States while Edie Amin was in power. And so they invited me, I was a kid, they invited me to come testify in the House and the Senate, and both houses passed this bill. Interestingly, the Carter administration, Jimmy Carter was the champion of human rights, but the State Department was not so happy about sanctions on human rights. The Congress overrode that, the law passed, and that was a an important milestone that in the years after that, a couple years after that, contributed to the government being overthrown by uh uh Milton and Bote and Ugandans living in exile. So it was an early indication to me. And by the way, I went to a meeting of the annual meeting of General Foods in in New York in White Plains with the Sisters of Mercy. And among other things, we were challenging the fact that you know their coffee was being produced, the robusta coffee beans were coming from Uganda. And of course, nobody at General Foods knew anything about this. But that was an early indication to me. You need to get in there and look for ways at a local level you can make a difference. So me and the Sisters of Mercy were in there raising this at an annual shareholder meeting to a bunch of bewildered people going, Where's Uganda? What does that have to do with making coffee? So that was an opening, you know, salvo for me, and it said, this is a big subject. Got to take it one bite at a time. But I was convinced that this is an area where uh you can make a difference. And I've sort of bumped from one thing to another, but I've managed to keep the through line of trying to make a difference in our society and our world.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Well, that's that's powerful. And you said you were a young kid. I mean, that's that's like a a beautiful way to see what's possible through government, actually, but then also through business. And I think that's where you have that through line. There is a way in if you are committed. And uh can you just share a little bit some of the other follow-up steps? Because then you were working for uh human rights first, I think, or what became human rights first, but you also did other things. What would you say is some of the highlights that uh really sort of formed you also?

SPEAKER_02 11:07

So I did that for a long time. Again, I was still quite young when I went to work for what was then the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. It's now called Human Rights First. But I think I was 27. Um, I gave up my law career, and I was supposed to be, I had been hired by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago, which is where I was practicing law, and went to work for an organization that basically was just getting off the ground. So I was the first employee. I think we had, they had raised $60,000 to hire somebody. There was no board, no staff. It was a bit crazy, but again, I sort of followed my heart. I thought, what the heck? You know, the worst that happens is I fail. And we built it over time to a more s much more substantial organization. Lots of places along the way. I'll give you a couple of examples, though, from the early time. We represented the families of the American nuns that were killed in El Salvador in 1980. We represented the Jesuits when the six priests were killed in 1989, also in El Salvador. Representing them meant we were sort of their lawyers, but sort of advising them on how do you change a culture of impunity. And so in the case of the church women, it got lots of attention again. I probably testified a dozen times in Congress. And the U.S. government became involved because there was a requirement, this was during the Reagan administration. Every six months, Congress said the U.S. government had a report on progress on human rights. And the churchwomen's case became one of four or five indicators of progress. And so uh it's a long, complicated story, but in 1984, for the first time in Salvadoran history, five soldiers, members of the National Guard, were put on trial and convicted of the murder of these four American nuns. Unprecedented, unheard of, the trial was broadcast nationally on radio. It was a front page story in every newspaper in the world. And then a decade later, when the priests were killed, high profile, these were prominent Jesuit priests, again, world's attention, and again, a lot of time and energy. It's a long story, but they prosecuted a senior military officer the first time that it happened. Those two cases in a way indicated that accountability could be real even in a war-torn society. And it set on it was an important piece of moving from war to peace, establishing some notion of accountability for past crimes. So that was a very formative experience for me early on. Very different thing, anecdotally. In 1980, I'm going way back in time, but Congress was debating a new law on refugees called the Refugee Act. It was really in response to hundreds of thousands of Indochinese after the Vietnam War wanting to come to the United States. Senator Kennedy introduced this legislation and said we have to regularize refugee admissions. The bill was about to be, it took two years. It was about to be voted on. And I went into Senator Kennedy's assistant, his aide, who was leading this, and I said, you know, we have a provision, a treaty obligation to accept people who are already here as refugees using a method called political asylum. But we don't have it in the law. We have a treaty provision, we have a form for the immigration authorities, but there's no law. This is why do you put this in the Refugee Act? So he literally said to me, go back in my office and sit down and write what that would look like. I spent 15 minutes or 20 minutes, wrote two sentences, and he said, okay, we're going to introduce this tomorrow. He sent it to Legislative Council. They made it into law-like words. The Senate voted the next day. I ran over to Sen uh Congresswoman Holtzman's office. She was chair of the House Judiciary Committee. The House voted on it the next day. It went to conference. By the end of the week, that was part of the Refugee Act. That's Section 208. So political asylum happened not because there was a multi-year campaign. It happened because I happened to be in the right place at the right time with somebody who was open to it. And I just said, it's not too late. You can do this. And a week later, political asylum was part of U.S. law. Now, if we had done that six months later, the Mario boat lift happened that April. Well, it was already in the books, and so we were down the path of saying asylum is part of our legal uh framework. By the way, it's being challenged now in a way that it hasn't been challenged since then, but it's still the law, and it will be the law, and we're going to rebuild that. I have no doubt that this is a particularly troubling time for refugees, for immigrants generally. But the framework is in place because I happen to be in the right place at the right time.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

So that that's also a reality that proves possibility. It's like if you're in the conversation, if you're intentional about where and who to speak to, maybe these opportunities emerge for shifting certain conversations. That's what it sounds like to me. And that seems to be the the opportunity driver, and you've been able to do this. I I'm wondering how were you able to get into these conversations at such an age? I I'm looking back at my own formation. Of course, I'm not I I was working at Congress at some point, but I was I'm German. So I really felt like I'm out of place. But it was so interesting. But certainly I I never would feel competent to do that whole process. What gave you that conference? What gave you that um I don't know if it's Schutzbau, or is it just like seeing that opportunity? I mean, that's uh anything that you can share about that?

SPEAKER_02 18:15

You know, I don't think there's one answer to that. It's some combination of audacity, I guess. It's, you know, sort of reaching for the stars and saying, gotta try. If it's important, I've got to try. Success also begets success. You know, if you're able, those two cases in El Salvador, the Refugee Act, the Asylum Provision, sort of made me think, okay, I did those things when I was, you know, very, very young. But I thought to myself, you know, you if you actually try to do things in a rational way, you try to find friends, Senator Kennedy or the Jesuits, or it turned out that a lot of members of Congress were trained by uh Jesuits. So we found our way into a lot of offices, not because of me, but because people felt, oh my gosh, six Jesuit priests were killed. That can't be right. Joe Moakley, who was the head of the Rules Committee, took it on as a kind of personal crusade. And Jim McGovern, who's now in Congress, was his staffer. It was a point of pr passion for them. So having the right allies and going about it in a way that's practical, I tend not to be um flamboyant or rhetorical. I'm not a fan of adjectives. So I find that there's a value in approaching things in a in a way that's maybe less passionate but more fact-based. And it's also uh a big part of what you know I do, I've done for a long, long time, is to find myself in a room with people I don't agree with and to listen and to try to figure out where they are coming from, what's motivating them to do the things they're doing, and where can we find points of convergence that allow us to build some level of trust. That's often key to these discussions. It's for the person I did this certainly in government a lot where I was dealing with governments that were doing terrible things. I didn't approach them in a way that, you know, chastised them for being evil. I listened. And I when I would do a press conference after visiting Egypt or China or wherever, I would repeat back the things that were on their mind. And then I would get into what was on my mind. But it's, I think, really important, and it's an advocacy approach, or at least it's worked for me, to understand people's fear, their anger. A lot of what motivates people are negative emotions and a sense that somehow there's an insecurity that the other side doesn't understand. And to kind of get to the point where you're at least acknowledging that is really important, looking for some common ground, and then finding a place to deal with the most difficult issues in a way that you're in some way diminishing uh the confrontation of that and finding a way to to to make progress based on some sense of some sense of confidence that you're not their enemy. It's uh it's a hard thing to do. I I've s I say in working in human rights, I work with the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. And when I'm sitting with people that are, you know, involved in the most horrendous Behavior, it's hard not to jump across the table and you know want to strangle them. But that's not going to succeed. And so part of it is trying to figure out how do you move the dial.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Wow, I'm getting goosebumps because in the end, I mean, in some way you're describing what we frame as humanistic management, where the practice of like finding common ground, we label dignity and allow that dignity to be acknowledged, and then you can potentially move towards other things that that are related towards common good-oriented issues or flourishing. And I'm wondering, did you always have that capacity? How did you develop that? Because that seems to be very crucial, I mean, to all the successes that you've had, as you had just described, but it's a very rare gift for many people. And I'm talking from a business school education perspective. I don't know if the legal education is so much different. It seems that listening is not developed, or listening training is almost never in the curriculum. It's speaking, it's rhetoric, it's talking at people, but rarely talking with people, or the way that you said acknowledging what I would call the dignity of the other side through listening processes. Where did you pick that up? Was that a natural gift? Was that just you being observant and understanding those dynamics intuitively, or did you have more formal training?

SPEAKER_02 23:27

I know I never had formal training. Uh I don't think law schools or business schools teach maybe there's a course somewhere on arbitration or uh mediation. That would probably be the closest to it. But you know, I've just been at it a long time and I've sort of I'm a pragmatic person. I'm not I'm trying to figure out how to get something done. And I observe that people are more likely to yield if they if they're less uncomfortable, let me put it that way. If they feel they're not talking to somebody who's out to get them. We live in a world, especially now, such a polarized world where everything is gotcha, you know, I wanna I wanna degrade the other side, I wanna prove that they're wrong and I'm right. That doesn't really get you very far. It it it it makes you more popular with people who agree with you. But at the end of the day, if we have these polar extremes yelling at each other and demonizing the other side, that may be good for, you know, cable TV or or the social media, but it isn't actually good for solving problems. So I'm sort of what I'm doing is antithetical to what Facebook is doing, you know, and what, you know, cable news is doing. I'm not trying to make a point, I'm trying to make a difference. And that's a big diff that just takes you in a different direction. And it's hard. It's especially hard now because you know, there's less there's less space for people to listen, there's more suspicion of who are you. You know, I'm in a business school, but the majority of people here are still operating in an old school, you know, they're still operating in the world of Milton Friedman. It's all about shareholder value. So when I came here, I think I don't think I know many of my colleagues thought, what the heck is human rights have to do with business education? And, you know, my theory was this is a 21st century. You can't treat things like climate change and human rights as externalities. They're actually essential to how you succeed in business. And then when we get to the discussion of returns, I'll say, you know, over time you're gonna be a more stable, successful company. I'm not gonna make the three-month argument that the share price is gonna go up, because I'm asking you as a company to invest in things that are not gonna raise the share price in the short term, but you're gonna be a more sustainable, healthy company with people wanting to come to work for you, with people staying with you. You're gonna operate in communities that are not hostile to you. You're gonna have less risk to your reputation. There's a range of things that make sense from a business perspective, but not if everything is tied to shareholder value. So I'm I'm in a little outpost here at Stern. I don't think what I just said would be voted on by a majority of my colleagues. But we made some inroads. We've been here 13 years. We've now built a network of business schools around the world, actually, 40 some countries, where somebody is at least teaching or doing research in this area. I think we've established a kind of beachhead where we've said this is actually part of what business education ought to be part of. But it's an uphill battle, and it we we've we haven't reached the place yet where it's mainstream.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:37

Yeah, and I mean that's sort of maybe you can share a little bit about the the switch or maybe also your work with business. Many of the examples that you've shared are government related, and you mentioned a couple of things with general foods and and and going in there and just sort of raising the issues of supply chains and maybe just lifting the veil of ignorance as an opportunity. But what got you to focus there and maybe what led to this uh formate of the formation of the center at Stern specifically?

SPEAKER_02 28:11

So one area where I did work when I was still at Human Rights First for actually for a number of years, related to labor supply chains, and in particular in the apparel industry, but more broadly apparel agriculture, farming, fishing, etc. And so an early wake-up call for me that this area needed work, two of them actually. One was kind of an amusing phone call I had. I got a call through an intermediary from Ben Cohn, who's one of the founders of Ben and Jerry's. Yeah, yeah. And they were about to be, they were, they were in a negotiation with Unilever, a giant multinational, to buy their ice cream company. And he calls me and he says, We're in an impasse. I've told Unilever I'm not going to sell, we're not going to sell our company unless you improve your human rights performance by 25%. And I said to him, What did you mean by that? And he said, I have no idea. That's why I'm calling you. By the way, they did ultimately sell the Unilever, but that deal failed in part because Unilever didn't want to improve their human rights performance. Second experience, these are in the early 90s. I got a call from somebody at Levi Strauss, family-owned, prominent family, the Haas family in San Francisco. There was a 60 minutes broadcast about a sweatshop in Saipan in the Asia, in Micronesia, making Levi blue jeans. The young women from China had been brought to Saipan. It was part of the U.S. Trust territories in the Pacific, so the label could say made in USA. 60 Minutes sneaked a camera in there to show terrible conditions. And the Ed Bradley or somebody from 60 Minutes is knocking on the door of Bob Haas, the family patriarch. It was a family-held company at the time. I get a call from their public affairs guy, Bob Dunn, and he says, you know, we're we're being called out by 60 Minutes. This is terrible. What should we do? So we cooked up a scheme. He said, we really want to do the right thing. We don't know what that is. I said, why don't you basically identify the things that you would do at a factory in the United States and say to your suppliers, we want you to do the same thing. Come up with a code of conduct, eight or nine things, no forced labor, no child labor, limit the hours of work, health and safety, you know, no harassment, discrimination. So they cooked up their code of conduct and they sent it out with their purchasing people to every factory they were doing business. They were the first ones to do that. Now there are thousands of companies. We've gone way beyond that. But those two things said to me, wow, there's an outsourcing going on in a globalized economy, but there's also an outsourcing of responsibility. Levi's literally didn't know what was going on in that factory in Saipan, nor did any of their competitors. They were thousands of miles away. And so that began a process of trying to figure out how do you get global brands to recognize that their employees are not just those at headquarters, but it's the young women in Saipan or in China or in Bangladesh that are sewing their clothing. A couple of years later, I worked with people in the Clinton administration to create something called the Fair Labor Association. And that really grew out of, again, anecdotes. It was a scandal, got a lot of attention. At the same time, Kathy Lee Gifford, a TV personality, had a line of clothing for Walmart that was being produced in Honduras, another public relations scandal. And Robert Reich, who was the labor secretary to Bill Clinton, said, sweatshops are a big issue now on college campuses. Let's convene big brands, unions, activists, universities, do something about it. So in August of 1996, they convened a White House meeting and created what was then called the White House Apparel Industry Partnership. We met a month later in the old executive office building, I'll never forget this. And Robert Reich said, the fact that we're having a second meeting means that this has exceeded our wildest expectations. So I realized it was nice the government got us here, but we had to do this on our own. It took us six months to come up with our own code of conduct. And we had Reebok and Nike and PVH, uh Phillips Van Huesen, Liz Claiborne, we had a couple of the unions, uh peril unions, and we had some scruffy NGOs, that was me. And then we brought in a bunch of universities. It took us six months to come up with the code. It took us three years after another White House meeting to create the Fair Labor Association. And it's what I was describing before. It was building trust. It was around a table over those three and a half years going from one side against another. You know, I don't frankly, Reebok and Nike didn't trust each other. They couldn't sit with each other. And you brought in two unions and a bunch of NGOs that had labor in the name or human rights. We had lots of meetings where people would walk out, the meeting was about to fall apart. Over time, we built a culture within the FLA, within the Fair Labor Association, where people recognized there's more that unites us than divides us. And so it's now a thriving organization. 25 years later, with 40 companies, 120 brands, staff of almost 50. It's a real organization. But it was that early stage where you had to overcome the fears, the anger, the fights that were already going on between unions and companies, but within companies, to create a sense of, okay, there's actually some way we can benefit. So that's a kind of a classic to me example. Multi-stakeholder, government brought us to the table. Government wasn't ready to regulate. And so it was left to us, civil society, the universities, and the big companies, to come together to figure out how we can actually do a better job than what we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

That's that's quite encouraging. That was an early example exactly of what I think people then call multi-stakeholder dialogue, et cetera, and and uh non-governmental actors, quasi-regulating, setting standards beyond the in-house responsibility. In a globalized world, of course, that's the kind of challenges you're saying, because the disconnect is increasing in terms of uh what you can control and maybe what you want to control. What do you see right now with the center? What was what was the reason to create that center at Stern? And and uh what are your main entry points? I know that you have done work on migration, you've done work on the supply chains, you've done work in in uh the textile industry, specifically, mining industry, et cetera. So what are some of the the key leverage points that you have identified there? And and and how yeah, how could others maybe support this?

SPEAKER_02 37:03

Yeah. So just a word about how we started and why, and then I'll I can give you an example or two. When I was in the U.S. government, I was really struck by how limited the thinking was about how you make change. I spend endless hours in meetings of government officials around a table. We all sat there in front of our flags, we had our country's name in front of us, and we would sort of pretend, this is at the UN or at regional meetings, whatever. We would sort of pretend that we would, if we could get our other governments to agree, we would solve the world's problems. And I thought to myself, okay, here's three here's three groups that aren't at the table. Violent extremists, terrorists. ISIS may have a flag, but they're not showing up at our meeting. In fact, they want to tear down everything we're doing. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars fighting extremism. They're not part of our conversation. I'm not saying they should be, but we need to recognize that that's one constituency or one group that we're not reaching. You have humanitarian crises. We now have an Ebola crisis coming out of Africa, COVID, we have hurricanes, all kinds of natural disasters. Governments, including the richest governments, Germany, United States, we don't have the resources to deal with those things. So we rely on the Red Cross or Medso and Sans Frontier or some other group to do it. They're not at our table. And yet they're part of the solution in dealing with these humanitarian crises. And then we talk about the global economy. And if you measure economists hate when I say this, but if you measure revenues and GDP, half of the biggest economies of the world are not countries, they're private companies. So Walmart or Amazon now have revenues of close to $700 billion. That's equivalent to the GDP of Belgium or Taiwan. And so we're talking about the global economy without half of the biggest players being in the room. And I would say to people at the State Department, why do we have an ambassador to Benin and we don't have an ambassador to Walmart? Is there any doubt that Walmart has more influence and is more has more consequential to the global economy than Benin? I don't mean to pick on Benin, but there are lots of poor countries that don't have the cloud of a Walmart or an Amazon. And so that that sort of stuck with me as I was leaving government. I thought, you know what, this is an area like the human rights discussions that I was part of in the 70s, where we're trying to figure out what we were doing. There was a lot of groping for answers. Um we're now in the business and human rights area at a similar early stage, trying to figure out what are the levers, what are the standards, how do you get companies to play in this space, in this sandbox. So that prompted me to want to set up a center. Several people uh invited me to come to a law school to do it. And I said, you know, business people, my impression is business people either hate lawyers because they're sort of a pain in the neck, or they use lawyers to advance their business interests. They rarely would listen to lawyers about something like human rights. And so I want to be at home on home court. I want to be where businesses feel most comfortable, and that means going to a business school. And I was lucky enough to come to NYU where the then president John Sexton embraced me. We had a terrific dean at the business school, Peter Henry, and and they very opened their arms and said, okay, let's try this, let's give it a shot. We got here in the spring of 2013, five weeks later, the factory complex in Bangladesh at Rana Plaza collapsed, biggest industrial accident since Bhopal. 1,100 mostly young women were killed, 2,500 injured, and we said, okay, this is business and human rights. These are global brands operating in a faraway place. Almost none of them even knew their products were being manufactured there because these were subcontracted facilities. And we we went to work on that and said, this is proof of concept. If we can make progress in Bangladesh and get involved in a serious way, that begins to show what this is all about.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

So Rana Plaza, I think that's something that many people still remember. What do you think has changed since then? Many of the kind of alliances have been formed, the apparel industry has its thing. It's sort of in many ways almost a standard right now that industry associations form these almost like risk management panels. Right. What do you see as the real progress there and and what remains to be done? What has your attention in that space?

SPEAKER_02 42:52

You know, I I guess I would say it's a mixed picture. Um I still believe that what the Fair Labor Association is doing is a gold standard. The companies that come into that are really being pushed to go beyond their comfort zone. Lots of companies won't join because the standard and the process is too high. You know, there's an accreditation, there's periodic review, they lose control, it's transparent, it's multi-stakeholder. Some combination but but there, as you say, there are lots of other things going on. Too many of them to me are window dressing or more public relations than reality. There's too much attention to process and policies, not enough to performance. So the UN created a framework fifteen years ago called the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. John Ruggie from Harvard. was the architect, it opened the discussion to more companies, but it doesn't include a standard. It's there's no substantive standard. I think you need that for every industry. You need a standard, you need metrics, you need a way to assess accountability, assess compliance or performance. We need to evaluate performance. Are workers better off because of X than they were five years ago? Those are the discussions that aren't happening. And so now understandably a lot of frustration we haven't made enough progress. Governments, especially the EU, but some others, Australia, Canada, are beginning to look at legislation on supply chains or on mining or on due diligence broadly. Those are heading in the right direction, but it's a bumpy road. European governments are ambivalent. On the one hand they want to be seen as being leaders. On the other hand, you know Chancellor Mertz or Macron in Per in France have said we need to be competitive. Europe is afraid they're losing out to the U.S. and China in the global marketplace. Too many regulations are bogging us down. So it's going to take a decade before that gets settled. But I think where I wind up looking to the future is that there will be some smart government regulation combined with smart corporate leadership recognizing that this is the trend, there's going to be some kind of oversight or regulation. And so the best companies are going to say rather than be laggards or waiting for somebody to catch us, let's get out front and try to be do the right thing. And we can see that already there are a range of companies European companies, some American companies, UNICLO, fast retailing in Japan, there are a number of companies many in the Fair Labor Association and elsewhere that are actually trying to do the right thing. They just need a kick in the pants whether it's coming from a government or from characters like me and my colleagues at NYU there is a serious discussion going on. I see it in the tech sector all the time. Look at Anthropic, look at Microsoft, look at Apple. They're companies struggling with the complexity but recognizing they have to do better. So that's where we are right now. Step and a half back another step forward half step back. It's not I I can't say there's it's not linear. It it's not overnight. But I'm very I again I'm a chronic optimist. I have no doubt that these issues are finding an audience young people care more about these things than old old white guys like me. Women care more than men. The investment community's changing who who controls investment dollars? Europeans care more than Americans I'm generalizing but there's no question that we're moving in a direction where these issues are more prominent and we're seeing creative ways in which companies are actually coming to the table.

SPEAKER_00 47:39

Where if you can before we sort of move to the the last segment where do you see the most promise and other companies that you would particularly want to highlight in terms of their commitment as role models that where reality proves possibility?

SPEAKER_02 48:00

Yeah I mean any or well let me give one example I could give plenty of examples. I just mentioned Anthropic and Microsoft on the tech side they're doing both of those companies are actively internally struggling with the complexity and the power of these new technologies. But let me give an example that is is it gives a slightly broader frame. The gaming industry which I don't you know we spend a lot of time now worrying about AI and all of that. I'm worried about the gaming industry. Three billion people play these games it's more lucrative there's more money being made in gaming than movies, music and sports combined and a lot of the games are fine many of the games are violent and the chat rooms on these violent gaming sites are awash in bad behavior, misogyny, racism, extremism, violence and we see it over and over again the the guy who attacked two mosques in New Zealand in Christchurch, the man who killed ten African Americans in Buffalo, the guy who attacked a synagogue in Germany all of those are gamers who are on these chat rooms where everybody's talking about let's kill the black people, the Jews, the women, the gay people, whatever it is, and some unhinged character on that site says, I'm tired of talking, I'm going to go take action, watch me. So in 2023, my colleague Marianna Olizola Rosenblatt, we asked her to go dig in on gaming and this extremism she had never played a video game. She got herself immersed in that world and wrote a fabulous report which looked at this phenomenon. In 2024 we said okay we need to get some of the industry leaders and with regulators with academics with activists and we created a another multi-stakeholder group she did which has now been meeting weekly for the last two years. It includes Epic Games which is one of the big ones Microsoft which is Activision Xbox includes three regulators, a half a dozen academics and they are critiquing national legislation. Last month it was a French proposal this month it's one from Brazil. So here you have industry leaders and two years ago the companies were saying this is not our problem. You know there's these are private chat rooms and we said no they're private chat rooms on your site. This is like you own a restaurant and some guy comes in and starts screaming he hates black people you throw them out of your restaurant. These are the chat rooms you bear some responsibility we've turned a corner we've got two big companies now at the table with regulators with NGOs critiquing what the government of France is doing or the government of Brazil. More companies are going to come to the table that's the future of this identify a real problem create a climate again where people don't feel afraid to sit at a table with people they don't agree with and then try to figure out practically what does that mean in terms of regulation?

SPEAKER_00 51:55

What does it mean in terms of what the companies themselves need to do well wow that that is impressive and that's something that I I think sort of escapes most people's attention including mine. So I I'm so glad that that uh that you you're sharing this and I'm also of course curious in many ways how we could support these efforts and and maybe that's a separate conversation at some point because I think there's monsoon networks that we're working with that are very much in the space of transforming business education. So I just want to want you to know that including the Jesuit schools including your friends at GBSN and and other uh networks and the various UN outfits that sometimes are platforms but not super active or strategic it seems and I don't want to diminish the work or something but I I I do see there is a a strong convergence with with some of the things that we're doing through the Club of Rome and other other other work. So I want to just put a pin in that and and have a follow up with you at some point. I thank you so much for for just sharing this and before we end can you give me a number from one to thirty five and then I'll 19 what do you consider your greatest achievement?

SPEAKER_02 53:17

Hanging in there for almost 50 years I guess. I'll tell you one thing I feel great about um that I didn't mention. I worked for four or five years in Northern Ireland and I got there in 1991 involving a case of a lawyer who was killed Patrick Fanukin and it was really people were really depressed about the troubles which had gone on since 1969. And I worked with a fa we worked with a fabulous group called the Committee on the Administration of Justice in Belfast and were involved with them and it wasn't, you know, John Major and Bill Clinton and George Mitchell made it happen. But we pushed very hard for there to be reform of the police and people all said I'd go to Catholic neighborhoods and they'd all say disband the RUC the Royal Ulster can stab you the police are an occupying paramilitary force. Go to Protestant neighborhoods we love the RUC 97% of the police were Protestant in a place where 42% of the population was Catholic. We pushed hard much to his credit George Mitchell and and John Major and Clinton agreed to set up a policing commission, the Patent Commission. They came back with a report which is the most important report ever done about policing which is a hard subject the Patent Commission report starts with this line the most important thing for policing is human rights and accountability. They disbanded the RUC, created the Northern Ireland Police Force the police force is now almost 40% Catholic they patrol the streets, they behave like regular police. That transformation in a decade was the most amazing thing I've ever seen and I think it reflects the fact even where you have hundreds of years of animosity in a very tough place where people say you can't make change I go to Northern Ireland every year to remind myself of what's possible. There are no more troops on the street people are sitting at cafes the police are directing traffic. Doesn't mean they've solved all the problems but they've come an enormously long way from those days in 1991 when I walked the streets in fear because the society was at each other's throat wonderful there's almost no better closing statement to reality proofs possibility as this anecdote so Michael thank you so much for taking the time and speaking with me and uh yeah it's a real privil privilege.

SPEAKER_00 56:04

So thanks again and to be continued.

SPEAKER_02 56:06

All right and well thank you for having me I enjoyed talking with you. Thank you. Take care of you.