BGF Conference has started with the introduction of Mr. Tuan Nguyen, editor-in-chief of Boston Global Forum:
“Welcome. I’m Tuan Nguyen, editor-in-chief of Boston Global Forum. We’re delighted you have joined us for our on-line conference on improving minimal global standards for worker safety and rights. The leader of the conference will be Governor Michael Dukakis, the chairman of Boston Global Forum. Mike is a three-term governor of Massachusetts, was the Democratic Party’s 1988 presidential nominee, and is currently on the faculties of UCLA and Northeastern University. He also heads the Dukakis Center, located at Northeastern.
I present to you Michael Dukakis”.
Mr. Michael Dukakis, Chairman of Boston Global Forum.
In his turn, Mr. Michael Dukakis has given out some opening remarks:
“Thanks Tuan and thank you all. Welcome all of you to this unique and very special conference which really launches the work of the Boston Global Forum and I just want to take a couple of minutes to tell you a little bit about the Forum and what we hope to achieve. Obviously, to express our appreciation towards all of you to joining us at this pretty early hour in the morning at least in the East Coast of the United States. The idea behind this was Tuan Nguyen’s, a remarkable person in his own right, who took part in the internet development in Vietnam and has spent a good deal of his time in the Boston area. He started the idea of creating this Forum, which would on the one hand, tap into the intellectual horsepower of the Boston area, and on the other hand reach out to you from many parts of the U.S and all over the world to deal with the specific international issues. It is his idea and we’re very grateful for Tuan and the wonderful collaborative team that you meet in the course of the discussion today to launch this. And thanks Prof. John Quelch who will moderate our discussion, who decided our issue of the year would be this important issue of international worker safety and health. Our hope is that we will have a good and lively discussion, to which many of you know we have well over 100 people who are now part of the conference this morning. A very special thanks, especially to my side and my colleagues from the government, both nationally and in Massachusetts. And we hope that, as a result of our discussion this morning, we can proceed to involve more and more people who are deeply interested in this issue. We hope to have a set of recommendations circulating to you and see if we can have a real impact in this very important public policy area. So thank you again all of you who join us and now I want to turn the discussion over to Prof. John Quelch of the Harvard Business School, who first suggested this topic and our opening issue. And we are very grateful for John to do that. We will run for about 90 minutes, and again, we are grateful to all of you to be part of this. So, John, it’s all yours”.
From left to right: BGF’s editor in chief Tuan Nguyen and chairman Michael Dukakis in the Conference room.