Stern Prof. Interviewed by P&Q on Human Rights

Poets & Quants recently interviewed Stern School of Business professor Michael Posner about his work on human rights in business education. Posner and his partner Sarah Labowitz, a research scholar at Stern, started The Center for Business and Human Rights at NYU Stern. This is the first of its kind at a business school in the U.S.

The Center for Business and Human Rights was launched in March 2013 with a strong belief in the power of business to create positive change in society. The Center’s mission is to challenge and empower companies and future business leaders to make practical progress on human rights.

The center hopes to encourage companies to meet challenges that they face in the areas of free expression and privacy rights online, workers’ rights in manufacturing facilities, child labor in agriculture, community security in the extractive industry and socially responsible investing.

In October, Labowitz and Posner drafted a letter to President Obama asking for the President to increase the country’s awareness of human rights issues in global business, in hopes to increase the global awareness of the issues.

In the interview, P&Q states, “For Posner and Labowitz, their mission at the Stern School is straightforward but challenging: develop a human rights curriculum for business schools, create a safe space where stakeholders can come to discuss challenging human rights issues, and conduct public reporting and advocacy.”

Posner comments in the interviews, “What we are trying to do is take the very structured definition of human rights (as defined under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and say, ‘Okay, how does that apply to business?’”

Find the entire P&Q interview here. Find more information on NYU Stern from MetroMBA here.

regions: New York City

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