Center for Business and Human Rights

In a global economy, multinational companies often operate in jurisdictions where governments are either unable or unwilling to uphold even the basic human rights of their citizens. As part of its work to educate the world’s future business leaders, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights today released the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary textbook on the human rights challenges facing businesses – and how to approach solutions.

Business and Human Rights: From Principles to Practice is the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary textbook that aims to ignite a much larger conversation about transforming business education to encompass business and human rights. Stern's Center for Business and Human Rights Research Director Dorothee Baumann-Pauly and Visiting Scholar Justine Nolan examine the regulatory framework that grounds the business and human rights debate and highlights the business and legal challenges faced by companies and stakeholders in improving respect for human rights.

The recent and dramatic upheaval in the Chinese economy has shaken many Western investors and signaled greater business risks in the Middle Kingdom.

This report is the second study by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights on working conditions and the garment industry in Bangladesh. It is the result of a large-scale data analysis of factory data that the Center collected and analyzed from publicly available sources and a field survey conducted in June 2015. The Center’s analysis sheds light on an important, but opaque part of the garment sector: indirect suppliers.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Human Rights works to promote industry-wide approaches to human rights challenges. In 2014, the council, including Professor Michael Posner, undertook a two-year project to examine global supply chains with the aim to explore the increasingly vital relationship between large global buyers and the local suppliers and governments in the countries where they operate.

Excerpt from Quartz -- "Fixing these problems is an enormously complex undertaking, but it’s a necessary one. Bangladesh’s garment industry has helped millions to escape poverty, and it’s not for the best if brands pull out of the country. The best solution, Labowitz and Baumann-Pauly write, is 'shared responsibility,' in which all parties acknowledge the scope of the problem, allow space for honest discussion, and act together to fix it."

Excerpt from The Atlantic -- "In the wake of Rana Plaza, factory safety programs meant to improve fire and building protocols were agreed upon by politicians and several major brands such as Costco, Walmart, and Macy’s. But according to the NYU report, these agreements only cover 27 percent of factories and 45 percent of laborers who work for some of the largest and most advanced factories in the country. And for the most part, even the factories that fall under the purview of these programs haven’t completed the reforms necessary to make them safe. The holdup, the study finds, is a battle over who should pay for expensive electrical and structural upgrades—the factories or the brands that buy from them."

This report is the second study by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights on working conditions and the garment industry in Bangladesh. It is the result of a large-scale data analysis of factory data that the Center collected and analyzed from publicly available sources and a field survey conducted in June 2015. The Center’s analysis sheds light on an important, but opaque part of the garment sector: indirect suppliers.