Business and Human Rights at NYU Stern: MBA News

Earlier this year, NYU Stern School of Business in New York announced that it would be launching the world's first center for business and human rights at a business school.

Speaking to the Financial Times, NYU Stern's Professor Michael Posner, previous aid to US president Barack Obama and now the NYU Stern's professor of business and society, explains why it's vital that the world's next business leaders are trained in business human rights.

According to Posner, companies "don't want [their] pyjamas or t-shirts found in the next building that collapses," referring to the recent catastrophe in Bangladesh where a factory producing clothes for European and North American markets collapsed, killing many workers. "My premise is how do you educate students, who will be the next business leaders, that rights will be part of the job. How do you prepare them to do what the best companies are doing? It’s about integrating it into the way we think. It belongs in business school.”

Whose Business is Human Rights?

Continuing speaking to the Financial Times, NYU Stern's Professor Posner expresses his concern that while businesses have, in some cases become more influential than countries, adequate processes and systems are not yet in place to ensure that business human rights values are upheld.

"We have neither the capacity nor the standing to create the metrics, but we can be a catalyst. There will always be rogue companies... [but] you have to have a critical mass with a shared sense of what the standards should be.”

“How do companies get over the aversion to work collectively with their competitors, because no companies can do this on their own? How do they work with local communities?”