Former Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner spoke about his work at the New York University's Stern School of Business last Friday in the Cabot Intercultural Center.
At the event, the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) honored Posner as this year's recipient of the Boryana Damyanova Award for Corporate Social Responsibility.
IGL Director Sherman Teichman began the presentation by introducing Posner and his past involvement with the university. According to Teichman, Posner has twice before brought his expertise to the university to engage with students involved in the Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) and Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and Services (ALLIES) programs. He also spoke briefly about Posner's career and his influence on human rights policy.
"Posner has had a remarkable career of courage and integrity from his early days fighting abuses in Uganda as a student up to what he's doing today," Teichman said.
Member of the IGL's Advisory Board Bruce Male (LA '63) presented the award to Posner after describing how the award came to be. Male, who is also a Trustee Emeritus of the university, explained that the award was named for student Boryana Damyanova from Bulgaria, whom he sponsored to come to the university in 2003.
At the time, Male said, Tufts had no financial aid for international students. He became Damyanova's "local dad" as she began a promising academic career as an international relations and economics double major. In 2005, however, Damyanova was struck by a motor vehicle and killed near campus. Her father in Bulgaria created the award to memorialize his daughter.
After thanking Teichman and Male for their introductions, Posner spoke about the context for his work at the Stern School of Business, where he worked to launch the first Center for Business and Human Rights.
He began by giving a short history on the ideology behind human rights organizations. Not until Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms Speech in 1941 did discussion of human rights as a world issue really exist, he said.
"The human rights idea in the world in which we're discussing is really, in terms of human history, a very new concept," Posner said.
In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that both internationalized the conversation about human rights and recognized them as something that all human beings are born with, he said.
While governments began the conversation, today it is non-governmental agencies that have made progress in preserving these rights. When Posner first became involved in the field during the 1970s, very few of these organizations existed in regions of Africa and Asia.
"Now with the exception of probably North Korea, there are groups in every country in the world doing women's rights, children's rights, environmental rights, gay rights, human rights," Posner said. "The world has changed because non-governmental activists have forced change for the good."
On the other hand, non-government affiliated organizations have also caused much harm in the past few decades. Extremist groups such as al-Qaeda are more difficult to handle than state organizations, Posner explained.
"They don't have a flag," he said. "They don't come to be diplomatic. They really don't care at all about the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] or human rights treaties."
Much of Posner's work at the U.S. Department of State has had to do with managing the relationship between states and the private sector, he said. According to Posner, of the hundred largest economies in the world, half of them belong to private companies.
"I kept saying to people in the State Department, 'Why do we have an ambassador to Benin and not one to Walmart,'" Posner said. "Walmart's clearly having more of an effect."
As companies begin taking their business to other countries around the world, the issue of human rights responsibility becomes problematic. While governments are supposed to be primarily responsible for their people's welfare, Posner said, the fact of the matter is that many of these countries are not strong enough to protect themselves. Private companies often do not pick up the responsibility.
"What we have is a range of places where very, very big private entities are coming into very, very poor, disadvantaged countries where governments are not doing what they need to do to protect their own people," Posner said.
The issue of human rights in business therefore becomes a very practical one, Posner said. Company heads must know what their duties are when a person is killed in one of their factories, or when the National Security Agency orders them to hand over confidential information.
At NYU Stern, Posner hopes to teach students to conduct business while being mindful of these issues.
"I want to promote American products," he said. "I want to promote the American economy. I want to make sure we have a strong balance of payments. But I also want to make sure we're consistent with our own values and principles."
Posner described a conference held at Stern last month to reference examples of pertinent issues involving human rights in business. The conference came about as a result of tragedies involving garment factories in Bangladesh.
Formerly the 10th poorest country in the world, Bangladesh in the last several years has begun reforming its economy by becoming the world's second largest garment producer.
"It's pulled people out of extreme poverty - that's the good news," Posner said. "The bad news is that they're doing it at a price."
While many workers, most of them young women, have jobs for the first time in their lives, the country's poor infrastructure cannot effectively manage working conditions. Old 10-story buildings built on top of garages are collapsing on their workers and factory fires are killing people nearly every month, Posner said. This past April, 1,100 workers in the Bangladeshi Rana Plaza were killed when the building, home to some of the biggest brands in the world, collapsed.
To work to solve this issue, Posner helped to create a conference where officials involved in the incident had two days to discuss ways to prevent future occurrences. Bangladeshi factory owners, big brand representatives, government officials, academics and consumers, among others, joined in the conversation. The discussion, Posner said, forced the companies to reexamine their business procedures.
While Posner appreciates activism through social entrepreneurship, he hopes that more business students involved in human rights will join large companies like Walmart and General Electric, which have greater effect on the world. He believes that there's a growing market for people interested in directing human rights campaigns within these organizations.
"Companies are realizing that their world has changed," he said. "There has to be an external dimension to what they're doing."
At the end of the presentation, Posner opened the discussion for a question and answer session.
