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UPCOMING: Announcement of Framework for Peace @Dec 12

by Admin | Dec 10, 2014 | Event Updates

Boston Global Forum is proudly to host the next online-live conference focusing on building a framework for peace and security and to celebrate its two-years of operation.

The conference will be live-streamed at www.bostonglobalforum.org

Send your question to office@bostonglobalforum

TIME & VENUE

Time: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM EST, Friday, December 12, 2014
Venue: Room 275, 2nd Floor, Taubman Building, Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School
Connecting with: Bonn, Hanoi through Web Video Conference

MODERATORS

Governor Michael Dukakis – Co-Founder, Chairman, Boston Global Forum

KEY DISCUSSION TOPICS

Announcement of the Framework for Peace and Security in the Pacific
Introduce the Global Threats Index
Establishment of the Young Leader Network for Peace and Security (YLNP)
Announcement of the Michael Dukakis Leadership Fellow Program
Anniversary of BGF’s two-years operations

SPEAKERS AND DELEGATES:

Governor Michael Dukakis – Co-Founder, Chairman, Boston Global Forum
Kitty Dukakis – Former First Lady of Massachusetts
Thomas J. Vallely – Member of Board of Thinkers, Boston Global Forum; Senior advisor, Mainland Southeast Asia; Former Director of the Vietnam Program, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School
Professor Thomas E. Patterson – Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum; Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard Kennedy School
Professor John Quelch – Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum; Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Professor Ezra Vogel – Member of Board of Thinker, Boston Global Forum; Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, Harvard University
Nguyen Anh Tuan – Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Executive Officer, Boston Global Forum
Ambassador J.D. Bindenagel – Former U.S. Ambassador, Henry Kissinger Professor for International Security and Governverce, Bonn University
Professor Richard Rosecrance – Adjunct Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; Research Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles
Charles M. Sennott – Co-Founder, Global Post; Founder and Executive Director, The Ground Truth Project
Professor Suzanne P. Ogden – Professor and Interim Chair of Northeastern University’s Department of Political Science.
Maribel Lieberman – Founder and Chief Executive Officer, MarieBelle New York Chocolates
Nguyen Thi Chau Giang – Concert pianist; Composer; and Painter
Llewellyn King – Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Co-Host and Executive Producer of PBS “White House Chronicle” program
Professor Barry Nolan – Member, Boston Global Foum Editorial Board; Professor, Department of Journalism, Boston University
Dr. Anders Corr – Principal, Corr Analytics Inc.
Iryna Vushko – Assistant Professor of History, Hunter College, City UNiversity of New York
Le Mau Tuan – Founder and CEO of Zenquiz.net , MIT PhD candidate
David Case – Senior Editor, Global Post
Richard Pirozollo – Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Founder and Managing Director, Pirozzolo Company Public Relations
Dr. Elliot Salloway – Chief Operation Officer, Boston Global Forum
Michael DiMuccio – Senior Vice President, US Trust Bank of America
Guy Ronen – VP, Retail Market Manager, People’s United Bank
Anh C. Duong – Vice President, Manager, Bank of America
Mr Bui Duc Lai – Special Advisor of Chairman, Vietnam National Assembly
Jonas Brunschwig – Director of Leader Series, Boston Global Forum

____________________________________

GOVERNOR MICHAEL DUKAKIS

Co-Founder; Chairman of The Board of Directors and Board of Thinkers, The Boston Global Forum. Democratic Party Nominee for President of the United States, 1988. Distinguished Professor J.D., Harvard University

Michael Stanley Dukakis was born in Brookline, Massachusetts to Greek immigrant parents. He attended Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School and served in the United States Army from 1955-1957, sixteen months of which was with the support group to the U.S. delegation to the Military Armistice Commission in Korea.

He served eight years as a member of the Massachusetts legislature and was elected governor of Massachusetts three times. He was the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1988. Since 1991 he has been a distinguished professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, and since 1996 visiting professor of public policy during the winter quarter at UCLA in Los Angeles. He is chairman of Boston Global Forum. He is married to the former Kitty Dickson. They have three children—John, Andrea and Kara—and eight grandchildren.

THOMAS J. VALLELY

Member of Board of Thinkers, Boston Global Forum; Senior advisor, Mainland Southeast Asia; Former Director of the Vietnam Program, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School

Thomas J. Vallely is the senior advisor for Mainland Southeast Asia and the former director of the Vietnam Program, a position he held since its inception in 1989.

Vallely has used the Vietnam Program’s research to engage in a candid and constructively critical dialogue with the Vietnamese government about the strategic challenges confronting the country. Under Valley’s leadership the Fulbright School has emerged as a center of excellence in public policy research and teaching and a pioneer in the development of new modes of institutional governance in Vietnam.

A primary focus of Vallely’s past work is institutional innovation in Vietnamese higher education and science. He draws on the Program’s experience designing and developing innovative educational initiatives in Vietnam to pursue a dialogue about higher education reform with Vietnamese and international stakeholders. Vallely highlights the central importance of governance to achieving better outcomes in higher education and believes that international universities must revise current paradigms of academic exchange in order to effectively support institutional innovation in Vietnam. Vallely has also worked in Cambodia, Myanmar/Burma, Mongolia, and the Ukraine. In these countries he has focused on the political economy of reform. Prior to becoming director of the Vietnam Program, Vallely was a senior research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, where he worked on strategic and military issues in East and Southeast Asia. He has worked as a political consultant and was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1980, serving until 1987. Vallely received a B.S. from the University of Massachusetts/Boston and an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School. Vallely served with the United States Marine Corps in Vietnam

NGUYEN ANH TUAN

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Editor-in-Chief of The Boston Global Forum.

Nguyen Anh Tuan was the Founder and Chairman of the VietNamNet Media Group and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of VietNamNet Online Newspaper. Tuan was also the Founder and CEO of the VASC Software and Media Company and VietNet, the first Internet service provider in Vietnam. In 1996, Tuan was named as one of the Top Ten Outstanding Young Talents of Vietnam by the Prime Minister. Under Tuan’s leadership, VietNamNet raised significant political topics for reform in Vietnam. He pioneered an interactive live format called the “VietNamNet Online Roundtable” that enabled readers to participate in interviews of leading political, social and cultural figures. In 2009, Tuan conceived a global initiative called the “World Compassion and Reconciliation Day” on September 9th of each year. In 2007, as the Shorenstein Center’s Fellow, Tuan researched key trends in the development of electronic media in Vietnam. In 2011, Tuan was a part of the Pacific Leadership Fellows Program at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California in San Diego. That year, he was also a speaker at the prestigious annual Club de Madrid Conference on the subject of Democracy and Digital Technology. Since February 2011, Tuan has been an Associate of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. In April 2012, he founded the Tran Nhan Tong Academy . In December 2012, Tuan co-founded the Boston Global Forum with the Honorable Michael Dukakis who was Massachusetts Governor and U.S. Presidential Nominee, and currently serving as the Boston Global Forum’s Chief Executive Board and Editor-in-Chief . Also in 2012, together with Ambassador Swanee Hunt, Tuan established the Charles Ansbacher Music Club to bring classical music to people who live in remote and distant locations. Tuan has been a member of Harvard Business School Global Advisory Board since 2008. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Free for All Concert Fund in Boston.

PROFESSOR THOMAS E. PATTERSON

Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum; Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard Kennedy School

Thomas E. Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press of Harvard Kennedy School and a co-founding member of BGF’s Board of Directors. His book, The Vanishing Voter, looks at the causes and consequences of electoral participation. His earlier book on the media’s political role, Out of Order, received the American Political Science Association’s Graber Award as the best book of the decade in political communication. His first book, The Unseeing Eye, was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half century. He also is author of Mass Media Election and two general American government texts: The American Democracy and We the People. His articles have appeared in Political Communication, Journal of Communication, and other academic journals, as well as in the popular press. His research has been funded by the Ford, Markle, Smith-Richardson, Pew, Knight, Carnegie, and National Science foundation. Patterson received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1971.

PROFESSOR JOHN A. QUELCH

Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum; Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

John A. Quelch is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He holds a joint appointment at Harvard School of Public Health as Professor in Health Policy and Management. He is also a fellow of the Harvard China Fund, a Member of the Harvard China Advisory Board and Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Between 2011 and 2013, Professor Quelch was Dean, Vice President and Distinguished Professor of International Management at CEIBS, China’s leading business school. Between 2001 and 2011, he was the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Business School. He served as Dean of London Business School from 1998 to 2001. Prior to 1998, he was the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing and Co-Chair of the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Quelch is known for his teaching materials and innovations in pedagogy. Over the past twenty-five years, his case studies have sold over 4 million copies, third highest in HBS history. In 1995, he developed the first HBS interactive CD-ROM exercise (on Intel’s advertising budgeting process). In 1999, he developed and presented a series of twelve one hour programs on Marketing Management for the Public Broadcasting System. Professor Quelch’s research focus is on global marketing and branding in emerging as well as developed markets. His current research projects address (a) understanding the contributions of marketing to the functioning of democracies and (b) formalizing appropriate marketing and customer metrics for periodic review by boards of directors. Professor Quelch is the author, co-author or editor of twenty-five books, including All Business Is Local (2011), Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy (2008), Business Solutions for the Global Poor: Creating Social and Economic Value (2007), The New Global Brands (2006), Global Marketing Management (5th edition, 2006), The Global Market (2005), Cases in Advertising and Promotion Management (4th Edition, 1996) and The Marketing Challenge of Europe 1992 (2nd edition, 1991). He has published eighteen articles on marketing strategy issues in the Harvard Business Review, most recently “How To Market In A Downturn” (April 2009), and many more in other leading management journals such as McKinsey Quarterly and Sloan Management Review. Professor Quelch has served as an independent director of twelve publicly listed companies in the USA and UK. He is currently a non-executive director of WPP and Alere. He served pro bono for eight years as Chairman of the Port Authority of Massachusetts. He is the Honorary Consul General of Morocco in New England and served previously as Chairman of the British-American Business Council of New England. Professor Quelch has been a consultant, seminar leader and speaker for firms, industry associations and government agencies in more than fifty countries. He is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council On Foreign Relations. He received the CBE for services to British business in 2011 and holds an honorary doctorate from Vietnam National University.

AMBASSADOR J.D BINDENAGEL

Henry Kissinger Professor for International Security and Governverce, Bonn University; Former U.S. Ambassador

J.D. Bindenagel, the Henry Kissinger Professor for International Security and Governverce in Bonn University, is responsible for deepening connections between DePaul’s Chicago and overseas campuses and communities. These local, global and government relationships support DePaul’s mission to prepare students, not only to better understand, but also to influence and shape the world in which they live. A former ambassador and 28-year veteran of the U.S. diplomatic corps, Bindenagel brings extensive experience in governmental and international affairs to his new post. Prior to joining DePaul, he was vice president for program at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. President Bill Clinton appointed him in 1999 as U.S. ambassador and special envoy for Holocaust issues. As ambassador, he provided policy, diplomatic and negotiating advice to the Secretary of State on World War II-era forced labor, insurance, art, property restitution, and Holocaust education and remembrance. He played an instrumental role in the negotiations that led to agreements in 2001 securing $6 billion in payments from Germany, Austria and France for Holocaust and other Nazi victims. A U.S. Army veteran, he served the State Department in Washington, D.C., and Germany in various capacities from 1975 to 2003. He was director for Central European Affairs in the Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs at the State Department from 1992 to 1994 and U.S. charge d’affaires and deputy chief of mission in Bonn, Germany, from 1994 to 1997. He was U.S. deputy chief of mission at the American Embassy in Berlin, East Germany, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and helped negotiate the reunification of Germany. Other Foreign Service assignments included head of the embassy political affairs unit in Bonn in the mid-1980s, when he helped pave the way for the deployment of U.S. Pershing missiles on German soil. Bindenagel was special U.S. negotiator for “Conflict Diamonds,” leading a U.S. government interagency group to create a certification process to prevent proceeds from sales of illicit rough “conflict” diamonds from financing insurrections against legitimate governments in Africa. He also was an American Political Science Association fellow with Congressman Lee H. Hamilton (1987-1988) and was director, Business-Government Programs for Rockwell International (1991-1992). Bindenagel received the State Department’s Distinguished Service Award in 2001, the Commander’s Cross of the Federal Order of Merit from the President of Germany in 2001, and the Presidential Meritorious Service Award from President George W. Bush in 2002. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PROFESSOR EZRA VOGEL

Member of Board of Thinkers, Boston Global Forum; Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, Harvard University

Ezra F. Vogel is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan in 1950 and serving two years in the U.S. Army, he studied sociology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, receiving his Ph.D. in 1958. He then went to Japan for two years to study the Japanese language and conduct research interviews with middle-class families. In 1960-1961 he was assistant professor at Yale University and from 1961-1964 a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, studying Chinese language and history. He remained at Harvard, becoming lecturer in 1964 and, in 1967, professor. He retired from teaching on June 30, 2000. Vogel succeeded John Fairbank to become the second Director (1972-1977) of Harvard’s East Asian Research Center and Chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies (1977-1980). He was Director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs (1980-1987) and, since 1987, Honorary Director. He was Chairman of the undergraduate concentration in East Asian Studies from its inception in 1972 until 1991. He was Director of the Fairbank Center (1995-1999) and the first Director of the Asia Center (1997-1999). Vogel was Chairman of the Harvard Committee to Welcome President Jiang Zemin (1998). He has also served as Co-director of the Asia Foundation Task Force on East Asian Policy Recommendations for the New Administration (2001). Drawing on his original field work in Japan, he wrote Japan’s New Middle Class (1963). A book based on several years of interviewing and reading materials from China, Canton Under Communism (1969), won the Harvard University Press faculty book of the year award. The Japanese edition of his book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (1979) is the all-time best-seller in Japan of non-fiction by a Western author. In Comeback (1988), he suggested things America might do to respond to the Japanese challenge. He spent eight months in 1987, at the invitation of the Guangdong Provincial Government, studying the economic and social progress of the province since it took the lead in pioneering economic reform in 1978. The results are reported in One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform (1989). His Reischauer Lectures were published in The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia (1991). His most recent publication is Is Japan Still Number One? (2000). He has visited East Asia every summer since 1958 and has spent a total of over six years in Asia. Vogel has received honorary degrees from Kwansei Gakuin (Japan), the Monterrey Institute, the Universities of Maryland, Massachusetts (Lowell), Wittenberg, Bowling Green, Albion, Ohio Wesleyan, Chinese University (Hong Kong) and Yamaguchi University (Japan). He received The Japan Foundation Prize in 1996 and the Japan Society Prize in 1998. He has lectured frequently in Asia, in both Chinese and Japanese. From fall 1993 to fall 1995, Vogel took a two-year leave of absence from Harvard to serve as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council in Washington. He directed the American Assembly on China in November 1996 and the Joint Chinese-American Assembly between China and the United States in 1998.

PROFESSOR RICHARD N. ROSECRANCE

Adjunct Professor, Harvard Kennedy School; Research Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles

Richard Rosecrance is an Adjunct Professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, a Research Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was formerly a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., Professor of International and Comparative Politics at Cornell University. He served in the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State. He has written or edited more than a dozen books and many scholarly articles. The singly authored works include Action and Reaction in World Politics (1963); Defense of the Realm: British Strategy in the Nuclear Epoch (1968); International Relations: Peace or War? (1973); The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (1986); America’s Economic Resurgence (1990); and The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and Power in the Coming Center (1999). The edited volumes include The Dispersion of Nuclear Weapons: Strategy and Politics (1964); The Future of the International Strategic System (1972);America as an Ordinary Country (1976); The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy(1993); The Costs of Conflict (1999); and The New Coalition of Great Powers(2001). He is the principal investigator of UCLA’s Carnegie Project on “Globalization and Self Determination”. He has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, Fulbright, NATO, and many other fellowships. He was President of the International Studies Association and served as Director of UCLA’s Center for International Relations from 1992 to 2000. He has held research and teaching appointments in Florence (the European University Institute); Paris (the Institut de Sciences Politiques), London (Kings College London, the London School of Economics, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies), and Canberra (The Australian National University). He has lectured widely in East Asia and Europe. His recent book on the “virtual state” has been translated into Japanese, Chinese (Taiwan), German and will shortly appear in Ar “Débat sur L’État Virtuel“. Professor Rosecrance is now at work on a book on international mergers which compares U.S. with European political and economic strategies.

CHARLES M. SENNOTT

Co-founder, Global Post; Founder and Executive Director, The Ground Truth Project

Charles M. Sennott is the co-founder of GlobalPost. He also heads up The GroundTruth Project, a foundation-supported initiative that is dedicated to training the next generation of foreign correspondents in the digital age and producing in-depth Special Reports for GlobalPost.

An award-winning foreign correspondent with 25 years of experience, Sennott has reported on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in at least 15 countries, including the 2011 revolution in Cairo and the Arab Spring. He was among the first journalists on the ground in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11th and has continued reporting there throughout the last decade. He covered the war in Iraq from the invasion through the surge to the beginning of the drawdown of troops. Before joining GlobalPost, Sennott was a longtime foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe. He served as the Globe’s Middle East Bureau Chief based in Jerusalem from 1997 to 2001 and as Europe Bureau Chief based in London from 2001 to 2005. He is the author of two books, “The Body and The Blood” and “Broken Covenant,” and a co-author of a third.

In 2005, Sennott was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. In the fall of 2006, he returned to the Globe newsroom as a Staff Writer for Special Projects where he did pioneering work in multimedia.

In April, 2008, he and CEO Philip Balboni launched GlobalPost, seeking to produce a new source of original international reporting for the digital age at a time of diminished foreign coverage by American media. Sennott built a stellar team of editors and more than 70 correspondents in 50 countries who since the site’s launch in January 2009 have produced excellent daily coverage that has been widely recognized in the industry. The team has also gained a loyal and growing audience that in early 2011 exceeded three million unique visitors per month.

Throughout his career, Sennott has broken new ground in reporting across platforms in print, video, audio and where they all come together on the web. His reporting has won numerous journalism prizes including the prestigious Livingston Award for National Reporting and the Foreign Press Association’s “Story of the Year,” and he was named a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting by Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center. For the last two years, Sennott has served as a juror in the “International Reporting” category for the Pulitzer Prize. He also sits on the board of the Overseas Press Club Foundation.

Sennott has been a frequent analyst of the Middle East and religious extremism for the BBC, CNN, the PBS NewsHour and NPR. In February 2011, he reported on the revolution in Cairo for PBS FRONTLINE. Sennott is a sought-after public speaker who has given talks at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Salzburg Global Seminar and the Newseum. He has also delivered formal lectures at Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth, University of Southern California, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Beijing University and Providence College where he delivered the commencement address and was awarded an honorary doctorate for his reporting on religion amid conflict.

He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (BA, History) and of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (MS). He lives with his wife and four sons in Harvard, Massachusetts. Sennott writes a regular column as GlobalPost’s Chief Correspondent and blogs at GroundTruth

BARRY NOLAN

Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Former Host of the shows “Nitebeat”, “Backstage”, and “Backstage with Barry Nolan”, Comcast Cable CN8 channel

Barry Nolan is an American former presenter on Comcast Cable’s CN8 channel, once hosting the shows Nitebeat and Backstage, and Backstage with Barry Nolan. He is a regular panelist on Says You!, a weekend radio word quiz show carried on many public radio stations but produced by Pipit and Finch. Nolan hosted Boston’s version of Evening Magazine for WBZ-TV (Channel 4) from 1980 until 1989. He left in 1989 and hosted a series of one hour specials for ABC titled “Over the Edge” He served as a correspondent for the Fox Network’s “Beyond Tomorrow” for a season and then for Paramount Television he was the host of Hard Copy from 1990 to 1998. He served as Senior Correspondent for Extra! from 2000 until 2003. He then moved to CN-8 as an Executive Producer and host of “Nitebeat.” From Jan 2009, until Jan 2011, Nolan served as Communications Director for Joint Economic Committee of Congress. In 2012, Nolan and his wife Garland Waller produced the documentary film, No Way Out But One. He is the winner of 6 Emmys, including awards for hosting, producing and commentary, a Gabriel Award, an Iris Award and a Los Angeles Press Club award.

LLEWELLYN KING

Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Co-Host and Executive Producer of “White House Chronicle” — a weekly news and public affairs program airing on PBS

Llewellyn King is the creator, executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle,” a weekly news and public affairs program,now in its 17th year on PBS. The program also airs on public, educational and government cable access television stations, and on Voice of America Television. Episodes can be viewed on the program’s Web site,whchronicle.com. An audio version of “White House Chronicle” airs weekends on SiriusXM Satellite Radio’s P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States) Channel 124. King is also a regular commentator on P.O.T.U.S.

In addition to broadcasting, King writes a weekly column for the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate and The Huffington Post. In 2006, University Press of America published a collection of his columns,“Washington and The World 2001-2005.” The columns mainly appeared in Knight-Ridder newspapersincluding The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, The Kansas City Star, The Charlotte Observer and The Columbus Dispatch. King was the founding editor-in-chief and publisher of The Energy Daily. The energy industry newsletter, created before the energy crisis broke out in 1973, was the flagship of his award-winning King Publishing Group, which he sold in 2006. The group’s other titles included Defense Week, New Technology Week, Navy News & Undersea Technology and White House Weekly. Over the years, King’s insightful reporting and analysis of energy has led to frequent guest spots on TV news shows, including NBC’s “Meet the Press” and PBS’s “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and CNN. King’s remarkable career in journalism began in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where he was hired,at age 16, as a foreign correspondent for Time magazine. He also reported from Africa for London’s Daily Express and News Chronicle and United Press.

Moving to London in 1959, King worked as an executive for The Daily Mirror Group, a reporter for Associated Newspapers, and a news writer for BBC and ITN.Then moving to the United States in the 1960s, King worked as an editor and reporter for The New York Herald Tribune, The Baltimore News-American, The Washington Daily News and The Washington Post. A stint at McGraw-Hill’s Nucleonics Week led to his founding The Energy Daily. But it wasn’t King’s first trailblazing publication; his first was Women Now, a monthly magazine targeted to emerging professional women in the 1960s. “It didn’t liberate any women, but it liberated all my money,” King quips. Before creating “White House Chronicle,” King and his wife, Linda Gasparello, co-hosted “The Bull and The Bear,” a daily stock market program that aired on the GoodLife and Jones cable television networks in the mid-1990s.

King has given more than 2,000 speeches; he is an erudite commentator on energy, foreign affairs, Congress and the White House, small business, science, technology and journalism. He has organized more than 1,000 conferences on issues ranging from nuclear energy to land mine removal, Social Security and campaign finance. For his longtime contribution to the understanding of science and technology, King received an honorary doctorate in engineering from The Stevens Institute of Technology. He has received hundreds of energy industry awards, and most recently the United States Energy Association’s 2014 Award.

RICHARD PIROZZOLO

Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Founder and Managing Director, Pirozzolo Company Public Relations

Dick Pirozzolo is the founder and managing director of Boston-based Pirozzolo Company Public Relations, whose clients have included the governments of Vietnam, Japan and Canada and corporations in Indonesia, Israel, the United Kingdom, Germany and China.

During the mid-1990’s, Dick figured prominently in fostering reconciliation and trade with Vietnam, building US public support for accepting Vietnam as a Most Favored Nation trading partner and launching trade initiatives in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, including the watershed VietnAmerica Expo – Hanoi’s official welcoming of US business. Additionally, he promoted successful trade initiatives with Vietnam on behalf of The State of Hawaii, Smith & Wesson, Syratech, the USA’s largest housewares company, and J/Brice Design International, Inc. the Boston and Dammam, KSA-based hospitality design and development firm.

In addition to establishing profitable relationships with Vietnam business and government entities, Dick arranged for positive media coverage of Vietnam by the world and US press – from Agence France Press and NHK to NBC Nightly News and Time Magazine. Additionally, his bylined articles, photos and op-ed pieces on Vietnam public policy and trade have appeared in the Washington Times, Insight, Transpacific, The Advertiser, Beverage World, Vietnam Business Journal, Destination Vietnam, The Boston Sunday Herald, Trade Show Week and PR News.

Dick brings high-level public relations, issues management and relationship-building skills to every client engagement. His recent work includes fostering carbon-offset trading on behalf of Trayport (GFIG/NYSE) and Foreign Exchange trading in Asia for FCM360, Inc. His earlier work includes public relations management positions with Boston University, where he was on assignment with the US Federal Court-Appointed Experts during Boston’s court-ordered and controversial school desegregation. Dick was a daily newspaper reporter with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and a freelance writer for national magazines. He is author of four successful nonfiction books on homebuilding and design and of For All the Years, a history of television in New England.

While working as a public relations consultant to WBZ-TV, Dick helped create and fund a million-dollar endowment for the performing arts in Massachusetts. He is a graduate of the University of Connecticut and was awarded the Bronze Star for service as a US Air Force captain in Vietnam where he served as a information (media relations) officer for the 7th Air Force in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City).

Dick is on the Advisory Board of the Association of Southeast Asia CEOs (SEACEO), serves on the Public Relations Committee of the New England Canada Business Council and has been an accredited member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) since 1978. He is also a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (formerly Sigma Delta Chi honorary society), The Foreign Press Association of New York and The New York Deadline Club

DR. ANDERS CORR

Principal, Corr Analytics Inc.

Dr. Anders Corr (B.A. Yale 2001 Summa, Ph.D. Harvard 2008) founded Corr Analytics Inc. (www.canalyt.com) to provide strategic analysis of international politics. He is the Editor of the Journal of Political Risk (www.jpolrisk.com). His areas of expertise include global macro analysis, quantitative analysis, and public opinion, and he maintains a global network of regional and subject-specific political risk experts. Dr. Corr has researched Russia and Ukraine for the US Department of Defense, as well as Israel and the Palestinian territories for a private client. He led the US Army Social Science Research and Analysis group in Afghanistan, which oversaw 600 Afghan contract employees on 44 survey projects, and conducted quantitative predictive analysis of insurgent attacks. Dr. Corr coordinated analysis at US Pacific Command (USPACOM) and US Special Operations Command Pacific (SOCPAC) on catastrophic risks for US national security throughout Asia, with foci on the Philippine insurgency, instability in Nepal, and security in Bangladesh. Dr. Corr conducted red team modeling and simulation for the Defense Department of terrorist attacks against extremely sensitive military installations, and worked on social networking for early warning of biological weapons of mass destruction. The research of Dr. Corr focuses on effects of military technology on the likelihood and outcome of war, predictors for revolutions and coups, and terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction. South End Press published his book, No Trespassing: Squatting, Rent Strikes, and Land Struggles Worldwide (1999), and the peer-reviewed journal Nonproliferation Review published his work on deterrence of nuclear terrorism. He peer reviews for the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Urban History, and Routledge Press. He frequently appears in the press, including Bloomberg, Financial Times, Forbes, New York Times, Nikkei Asia Review, United Press International, and Business Week.

DR. ELLIOT SALLOWAY

Chief Operation Officer, Boston Global Forum

Dr. Elliot Salloway trained in Periodontology at Tufts, B.U and University of Pennsylvania graduate medical and dental schools. His residency was at Beth Israel Hospital and University Hospital Boston. He served as a captain in the US Air Force during the Cuba crisis and then became the first periodontist to practice in the City of Worcester where he still sees patients after 50 years. He was a member of the faculty of Harvard graduate dental school for over 35 years (where the “E.W.Salloway Teaching and Research Fund “was established by his patients and friends). He has served on several arts boards including Boston Ballet friends, Public Action for the Arts, Photo Resource Center and the Massachusetts Repertory Company which was the first equity repertory company in Boston 1977-78. Mass Rep brought talent such as Helen Hayes, Julie Harris, Rex Harrison, Sylvia Sidney, Brian Bedford, Ben Gazzara, Eva Marie Saint and Harry Chapin to the Boston theater district. Dr.Salloway is also a member of several professional and arts organizations including Indochina Arts Partnership, Rakushokai(Tokyo),International Association of Dental Research, American Academy of dental research and American Academy of Periodontology. He has lectured worldwide in his profession and for five years at the Miami Historical Museum on his photographs of the changing Miami River. He is prolific photographer and painter who has shown in galleries in Boston ,Miami ,Berlin ,Krefeld Germany and Hanoi. He is the Co-founder of Project Exodus which calls on children and teenagers to make art which addresses the question “is genocide and crimes against humanity preventable”? Project Exodus is now active in Boston with a show in mid February 2014 at Leslie college with the organization Violence Transformed.

CHAU-GIANG THI NGUYEN

Concert Pianist, Composer, and Painter

Born in Hanoi, Chau-Giang Thi Nguyen was inspired by the cultural richness and romance of her native Vietnam, as well as by French influences that echoed through the cities and villages. Her earliest piano lessons were practiced on a Gaveau upright, a gift from her father. As a piano student of artists Thai Thi Sam, La Thuong, Tran Thu Ha and Dang Thai Son, Chau-Giang learned also to dance and to sing in French. At the age of six, she was chosen to entertain a battalion of Vietnamese soldiers. At eleven, she had her first piano performance at the Hanoi Opera House. Chau-Giang later studied at The Hanoi College of Music and Fine Arts, which garnered her invitations from the Indonesian government to perform for their dignitaries and visiting European Royal diplomats. In the 1990s, Chau-Giang continued her musical training in New York City, first at the Juilliard School for Piano Repertoire and Piano Ensemble under the tutelage of the late Maestro Gyorgy Sando and later at the Manhattan School of Music, where she was trained by Zenon Fishbein. In 1997, Chau-Giang became the first Vietnamese student to graduate from that prestigious school. While living in Soho in 1998, Chau-Giang began painting, an experience that has transformed her ideas about many things in life, including music. Her work ranges from large, abstract canvases, awash with vibrant color, to more intimate portraiture, some of which can be found on chairs in her studio, her audience for rehearsing Chopin or Schubert. Between 2007 and 2011, Chau-Giang’s attention turned to orchestration, and under the direction of Hans Zimmer she attended an elite forum for film orchestration in Los Angeles. An orchestral collaboration with Arturo Sandoval composed for Debbie Allen’s ballet “Hot Chocolate Nutcracker” earned a Goldstar award in 2009. Also that year, Chau-Giang’s original music were recorded by National Orchestra of Bratislava In 2010, Chau-Giang was honored by the Hanoi Opera House with the premiere performance of her original orchestra music by the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra. Chau-Giang has played solo performances at Steinway Hall and Disney Hall, and her original music has been performed at Lincoln Center in New York. In 2012, Chau-Giang had her solo debut at Carnegie Hall. Recently, on June 16th 2014, Chau-Giang performed and exhibited her art on same day in Kingdom of Bahrain’s Cultural Hall, in the collaboration of the coutnry’s Culture Ministry and Visionaries Foundation. October 2014, in collaboration with MarieBelle New York, The Art of Chocolate, Chau-Giang Thi Nguyen and the company’s owner, Maribel Liberman, had created a line of Ganaches in limited “River of Diamonds” edition which being featured in the Home Vouge magazine. Today, Chau-Giang travels throughout the world supporting the humanitarian mission of her organization International Friends for Vietnam in America, which helps develop musical talents in her homeland. These efforts connect many new audiences with Vietnamese artists, provide education and and raise awareness of the creative gifts to be found in Vietnam. She serves as International Ambassador of Education Through Music, is a member of Women Projects Theater, honored board member of Kingdom of Bahrain’s Visionaries, member of Maritage International and Women/Fashion Film Fest, Samuel Waxman Cancer Research, Co-Founder of Arcolmag Art Bookmagazine, Paris publishing house, and Founder of International Friends of Vietnam – IFoV.

Chau-Giang’s paintings are part of private collections around the world and can be seen in the Vietnamese Consulate in New York City, the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, the Prince Albert II Foundation, Princess Charlene of Monaco Foundation, AMADE Mondiale chaired by Princess Caroline of Monaco foundation, the Naval Museum in Monaco, Group Pastor Monaco Art Collection, Artcol Art Collection and future MAAR Museum Collection, the Association ARCOL. In 2013, Chau-Giang had the pleasure of exhibiting her paintings alongside the works of world-renowned musicians such as Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Ronnie Wood, Brad Pitt and Graham Nash at the OCEANOGRAPHIC Museum of Monaco.

MARIBEL LIEBERMAN

Founder and Chief-Executive-Officer, MarieBelle New York Chocolates

Maribel Lieberman is the founder of MarieBelle New York, and to this day its most inspired doyenne. From her first chocolate shop in Soho, Maribel’s passion for discovering and sharing new flavors has seen her continually reinvent how we enjoy chocolate. Lieberman lives in Soho in New York City with her husband, artist Jacques Lieberman and their daughter.

Maribel’s passion for confections started at an early age when as an eight-year-old child, she would make sugar candies and sell them to neighborhood children in her native Honduras. Her New York story began at the Parsons School of Design where Maribel’s love for fashion and design would take her on a jaunt in the fashion industry, followed by five years running her own elegant catering company – Maribel’s Gourmet Cuisine. This paved the way for her discovery of chocolate as a lifelong passion.

Maribel’s first New York City storefront, Lunettes et Chocolat, was a shop focused on both designer chocolates and glasses. Following this, Maribel’s bug for entrepreneurism led her to open her pride and joy, MarieBelle New York’s Soho shop, in 2002. And the future is equally delicious with the addition of Cacao Market in Brooklyn and the Japanese transplants of both stores in Kyoto.

Maribel’s advances as a female chocolatier have not gone unnoticed, with Inc. Magazine naming MarieBelle New York as one of “the fastest growing private companies in America” in 2012 and Oprah Winfrey herself giving accolades to her products in her highly coveted “Oprah’s Favorite Things.”

IRYNA VUSHKO

Assistant Professor of History at Hunter College, City University of New York

Iryna Vushko is an Assistant Professor of History at Hunter College, City University of New York. A native of Ukraine, she received a Ph.D. in history from Yale University and held fellowships in Italy, Austria, Poland, Germany, and Harvard. Her first monograph “The Politics of Cultural Retreat: Imperial Bureaucracy in Austrian Galicia, 1772-1867” is forthcoming with Yale University Press in early 2015.

OCTOBER 3 CONFERENCE: Delegates Bio

by Admin | Oct 1, 2014 | Event Updates

Governor Michael Dukakis

Madam Vaira Vike-Freiberga

Member of the Board of Thinkers, Boston Global Forum.

Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga is President of the Club of Madrid and former President of Latvia (1999-2007). She was instrumental in achieving membership in the European Union and NATO for her country, and was Special Envoy on UN reform among her international activities. Since 2007, she is an oft invited speaker on social issues, moral values, and democracy. She was Vice-chair of the Reflection group on the long term future of Europe, and chaired the High-level group on freedom and pluralism of media in the EU.

Having left Latvia as a child refugee to Germany in 1945, then French Morocco and Canada, she earned a Ph.D. in psychology (1965) at McGill University. After a distinguished career as Professor at the University of Montreal, she returned to her native country in 1998 to head the Latvian Institute.A year later she was elected President by the Latvian Parliament and re-elected in 2003.

She is member of four Academies, and Board member or patron of 30 international organizations, including the Board of Thinkers of the Boston Global Forum. She has received many highest Orders of Merit, as well as medals and awards, for distinguished work in the humanities and social sciences. She has published 14 books and authored over 200 articles, book chapters, reports, and audiovisual materials.

Professor Thomas E. Patterson

Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum; Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard Kennedy School

Thomas E. Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press of Harvard Kennedy School and a co-founding member of BGF’s Board of Directors. His book, The Vanishing Voter, looks at the causes and consequences of electoral participation. His earlier book on the media’s political role, Out of Order, received the American Political Science Association’s Graber Award as the best book of the decade in political communication. His first book, The Unseeing Eye, was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half century. He also is author of Mass Media Election and two general American government texts: The American Democracy and We the People. His articles have appeared in Political Communication, Journal of Communication, and other academic journals, as well as in the popular press. His research has been funded by the Ford, Markle, Smith-Richardson, Pew, Knight, Carnegie, and National Science foundation. Patterson received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1971.

Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan

Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Boston Global Forum.

Dr. Anders Corr

Principal, Corr Analytics Inc.

Dr. Corr has researched Russia and Ukraine for the US Department of Defense, as well as Israel and the Palestinian territories for a private client. He led the US Army Social Science Research and Analysis group in Afghanistan, which oversaw 600 Afghan contract employees on 44 survey projects, and conducted quantitative predictive analysis of insurgent attacks. Dr. Corr coordinated analysis at US Pacific Command (USPACOM) and US Special Operations Command Pacific (SOCPAC) on catastrophic risks for US national security throughout Asia, with foci on the Philippine insurgency, instability in Nepal, and security in Bangladesh. Dr. Corr conducted red team modeling and simulation for the Defense Department of terrorist attacks against extremely sensitive military installations, and worked on social networking for early warning of biological weapons of mass destruction.

The research of Dr. Corr focuses on effects of military technology on the likelihood and outcome of war, predictors for revolutions and coups, and terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction. South End Press published his book, No Trespassing: Squatting, Rent Strikes, and Land Struggles Worldwide (1999), and the peer-reviewed journal Nonproliferation Review published his work on deterrence of nuclear terrorism. He peer reviews for the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Urban History, and Routledge Press. He frequently appears in the press, including Bloomberg, Financial Times, Forbes, New York Times, Nikkei Asia Review, United Press International, and Business Week.

Joshua W. Haines

Leader, Cyber Systems and Operations Group, MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Mr. Joshua W. Haines is the Group Leader in the Cyber Systems and Operations Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He is responsible for managing research and development of technology and systems in support of national cyber missions including defensive and offensive cyber operations. The Group’s research and development is strongly based on operational involvement and real-world data sets, and culminates in operational deployment of novel capabilities to national cyber centers. Technology focus areas include system analysis, architecture engineering for resilience and security, development of network-centric cyber systems, automated analysis of mission—cyber reliance, cyber decision support tools, and development of datasets and metrics in support of research.

Mr. Haines received his MS from University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1999 and his BS from Union College in 1995.

Robert K. Gardner

Founding member, New World Technology Partners

Robert K. Gardner, founding member, has been a leader in “strategic” technology development and an incubator of technology enterprises since the mid-seventies. Mr. Gardner managed and participated in the launch of several development stage companies, including August Systems, Verdix, Meiko Scientific, Cryptek, Phoenix Numeric and Probity Labs. He led turnarounds of public technology companies, including General Kinetics and Verdix Corp. At a mid-cap DoD service provider, he created an intellectual property incubator which introduced Trusted TeamWorks™ and related innovations for government markets. He recently led the development of iRISK™ executive risk management methodology for a Fortune 500 service provider. Prior to forming NWTP, he held senior engineering and technical marketing positions for Burroughs Corporation’s Supercomputer activities, including ILLIAC IV, PEPE, LDSP and NASF. Mr. Gardner has a BSEE from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and studied graduate system engineering and business administration at Penn State and the University of Santa Clara respectively. He writes and speaks on the Enterprise impact of Cyber Risk and has prepared briefings and testimony for the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate committees and Industry forums. Mr. Gardneraided in the formation of several New York arts enterprises, including In The Pocket NYand The Brick Theater.He mentored Business Planning For Artistsworkshops at Brooklyn’s Third Ward and teaches Business For Poetsat The Brick Theater.

Llewellyn King

Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Co-Host and Executive Producer of “White House Chronicle” — a weekly news and public affairs program airing on PBS

Llewellyn King is the creator, executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle,” a weekly news and public affairs program,now in its 17th year on PBS.

The program also airs on public, educational and government cable access television stations, and on Voice of America Television. Episodes can be viewed on the program’s Web site, whchronicle.com. An audio version of “White House Chronicle” airs weekends on SiriusXM Satellite Radio’s P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States) Channel 124. King is also a regular commentator on P.O.T.U.S.

In addition to broadcasting, King writes a weekly column for the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate and The Huffington Post.

In 2006, University Press of America published a collection of his columns,“Washington and The World 2001-2005.” The columns mainly appeared in Knight-Ridder newspapersincluding The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, The Kansas City Star, The Charlotte Observer and The Columbus Dispatch.

King was the founding editor-in-chief and publisher of The Energy Daily. The energy industry newsletter, created before the energy crisis broke out in 1973, was the flagship of his award-winning King Publishing Group, which he sold in 2006. The group’s other titles included Defense Week, New Technology Week, Navy News & Undersea Technology and White House Weekly.

Over the years, King’s insightful reporting and analysis of energy has led to frequent guest spots on TV news shows, including NBC’s “Meet the Press” and PBS’s “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and CNN.

King’s remarkable career in journalism began in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where he was hired,at age 16, as a foreign correspondent for Time magazine. He also reported from Africa for London’s Daily Express and News Chronicle and United Press.

A stint at McGraw-Hill’s Nucleonics Week led to his founding The Energy Daily. But it wasn’t King’s first trailblazing publication; his first was Women Now, a monthly magazine targeted to emerging professional women in the 1960s. “It didn’t liberate any women, but it liberated all my money,” King quips.

Before creating “White House Chronicle,” King and his wife, Linda Gasparello, co-hosted “The Bull and The Bear,” a daily stock market program that aired on the GoodLife and Jones cable television networks in the mid-1990s.

For his longtime contribution to the understanding of science and technology, King received an honorary doctorate in engineering from The Stevens Institute of Technology. He has received hundreds of energy industry awards, and most recently the United States Energy Association’s 2014 Award.

King likes things that move : light airplanes, boats and horses.

Ryan Ellis

Postdoctoral Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Ryan Ellis writes and researches on topics related to cybersecurity, infrastructure politics, homeland security, and communication law and policy. Prior to joining the Belfer Center, Ryan was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and served as a Project Manager at the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC). He holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Elliot Salloway

Chief Operation Officer, Boston Global Forum

He has served on several arts boards including Boston Ballet friends, Public Action for the Arts, Photo Resource Center and the Massachusetts Repertory Company which was the first equity repertory company in Boston 1977-78. Mass Rep brought talent such as Helen Hayes, Julie Harris, Rex Harrison, Sylvia Sidney, Brian Bedford, Ben Gazzara, Eva Marie Saint and Harry Chapin to the Boston theater district.

Dr.Salloway is also a member of several professional and arts organizations including Indochina Arts Partnership, Rakushokai(Tokyo),International Association of Dental Research, American Academy of dental research and American Academy of Periodontology.

He has lectured worldwide in his profession and for five years at the Miami Historical Museum on his photographs of the changing Miami River.

He is prolific photographer and painter who has shown in galleries in Boston ,Miami ,Berlin ,Krefeld Germany and Hanoi.

He is the Co-founder of Project Exodus which calls on children and teenagers to make art which addresses the question “is genocide and crimes against humanity preventable”? Project Exodus is now active in Boston with a show in mid February 2014 at Leslie college with the organization Violence Transformed.

Richard Pirozzolo

Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Founder and Managing Director, Pirozzolo Company Public Relations

Dick Pirozzolo is the founder and managing director of Boston-based Pirozzolo Company Public Relations, whose clients have included the governments of Vietnam, Japan and Canada and corporations in Indonesia, Israel, the United Kingdom, Germany and China.

During the mid-1990’s, Dick figured prominently in fostering reconciliation and trade with Vietnam, building US public support for accepting Vietnam as a Most Favored Nation trading partner and launching trade initiatives in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, including the watershed VietnAmerica Expo – Hanoi’s official welcoming of US business. Additionally, he promoted successful trade initiatives with Vietnam on behalf of The State of Hawaii, Smith & Wesson, Syratech, the USA’s largest housewares company, and J/Brice Design International, Inc. the Boston and Dammam, KSA-based hospitality design and development firm.

In addition to establishing profitable relationships with Vietnam business and government entities, Dick arranged for positive media coverage of Vietnam by the world and US press – from Agence France Press and NHK to NBC Nightly News and Time Magazine. Additionally, his bylined articles, photos and op-ed pieces on Vietnam public policy and trade have appeared in the Washington Times, Insight, Transpacific, The Advertiser, Beverage World, Vietnam Business Journal, Destination Vietnam, The Boston Sunday Herald, Trade Show Week and PR News.

Dick brings high-level public relations, issues management and relationship-building skills to every client engagement. His recent work includes fostering carbon-offset trading on behalf of Trayport (GFIG/NYSE) and Foreign Exchange trading in Asia for FCM360, Inc. His earlier work includes public relations management positions with Boston University, where he was on assignment with the US Federal Court-Appointed Experts during Boston’s court-ordered and controversial school desegregation. Dick was a daily newspaper reporter with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and a freelance writer for national magazines. He is author of four successful nonfiction books on homebuilding and design and of For All the Years, a history of television in New England.

September 17 Conference: Speakers and Delegates – Biographies

by Admin | Sep 15, 2014 | Event Updates

Governor Michael Dukakis

Professor Joseph Nye

Member of Board of Thinkers , Boston Global Forum; University Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard University; Former Dean, Harvard Kennedy School

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is University Distinguished Service Professor and former Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a member of the Boston Global Forum’s Board of Thinkers. He received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Princeton University, did postgraduate work at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and a Deputy Under Secretary of State. His most recent books include Soft Power, The Power Game: A Washington Novel, The Powers to Lead and Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Diplomacy. In a recent survey of international relations scholars, he was ranked as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy.

Professor John A. Quelch

Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum; Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

John A. Quelch is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He holds a joint appointment at Harvard School of Public Health as Professor in Health Policy and Management. He is also a fellow of the Harvard China Fund, a Member of the Harvard China Advisory Board and Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Between 2011 and 2013, Professor Quelch was Dean, Vice President and Distinguished Professor of International Management at CEIBS, China’s leading business school. Between 2001 and 2011, he was the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Business School. He served as Dean of London Business School from 1998 to 2001. Prior to 1998, he was the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing and Co-Chair of the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Quelch is known for his teaching materials and innovations in pedagogy. Over the past twenty-five years, his case studies have sold over 4 million copies, third highest in HBS history. In 1995, he developed the first HBS interactive CD-ROM exercise (on Intel’s advertising budgeting process). In 1999, he developed and presented a series of twelve one hour programs on Marketing Management for the Public Broadcasting System. Professor Quelch’s research focus is on global marketing and branding in emerging as well as developed markets. His current research projects address (a) understanding the contributions of marketing to the functioning of democracies and (b) formalizing appropriate marketing and customer metrics for periodic review by boards of directors. Professor Quelch is the author, co-author or editor of twenty-five books, including All Business Is Local (2011), Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy (2008), Business Solutions for the Global Poor: Creating Social and Economic Value (2007), The New Global Brands (2006), Global Marketing Management (5th edition, 2006), The Global Market (2005), Cases in Advertising and Promotion Management (4th Edition, 1996) and The Marketing Challenge of Europe 1992 (2nd edition, 1991). He has published eighteen articles on marketing strategy issues in the Harvard Business Review, most recently “How To Market In A Downturn” (April 2009), and many more in other leading management journals such as McKinsey Quarterly and Sloan Management Review. Professor Quelch has served as an independent director of twelve publicly listed companies in the USA and UK. He is currently a non-executive director of WPP and Alere. He served pro bono for eight years as Chairman of the Port Authority of Massachusetts. He is the Honorary Consul General of Morocco in New England and served previously as Chairman of the British-American Business Council of New England. Professor Quelch has been a consultant, seminar leader and speaker for firms, industry associations and government agencies in more than fifty countries. He is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council On Foreign Relations. He received the CBE for services to British business in 2011 and holds an honorary doctorate from Vietnam National University. Professor Quelch was born in London, England, was educated at Exeter College, Oxford University (BA and MA), the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (MBA), the Harvard School of Public Health (MS) and Harvard Business School (DBA). In addition to the UK and USA, he has lived in Australia and Canada.

Professor Thomas E. Patterson

Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum; Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard Kennedy School

Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan

Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Boston Global Forum.

The Hon. Kevin Rudd

Former Australian Prime Minister

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. His fellowship began in February 2014. At the Belfer Center, Rudd will lead a major research effort on possibilities and impacts of a new strategic relationship between China and the United States. Mr. Rudd served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, then as Foreign Minister from 2010 to 2012, before returning to the Prime Ministership in 2013. As Prime Minister, Mr. Rudd led Australia’s response during the Global Financial Crisis. Australia’s fiscal response to the crisis was reviewed by the IMF as the most effective stimulus strategy of all member states. Australia was the only major advanced economy not to go into recession. Mr. Rudd is also internationally recognized as one of the founders of the G20 which drove the global response to the crisis, and which in 2009 helped prevent the crisis from spiraling into a second global depression. As Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Mr. Rudd was active in global and regional foreign policy leadership. He was a driving force in expanding the East Asia Summit to include both the US and Russia in 2010. He also initiated the concept of transforming the EAS into a wider Asia Pacific Community to help manage deep-routed tensions in Asia by building over time the institutions and culture of common security in Asia. On climate change, Mr. Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007 and legislated in 2008 for a 20% mandatory renewable energy target for Australia. Mr. Rudd launched Australia’s challenge in the International Court of Justice with the object of stopping Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. Mr Rudd drove Australia’s successful bid for its current non-permanent seat on the United Nation’s Security Council and the near doubling of Australia’s foreign aid budget. Domestically, Mr. Rudd delivered Australia’s first national apology to indigenous Australians as his first act as Prime Minister. His government introduced Australia’s first ever nation-wide school curriculum. He legislated for the biggest school modernization program in Australian history with the construction of new state-of-the art libraries, classrooms and multi-purpose facilities for every Australian primary school. To overcome the digital divide, he provided lap top computers for every year 9-12 secondary school student. On health, Mr. Rudd in 2010 negotiated with the Australian states a National Heath and Hospitals Reform Agreement, the biggest reform and investment in the health system in 30 years. In defiance of Big Tobacco, his government introduced the world’s first plain-packaging regime for all tobacco products. To improve the rate of organ and tissue donation, he established Australia’s first National Organ and Tissue Transplant Authority. In 2010, his government introduced Australia’s first ever paid parental leave scheme. He also established Australia’s first ever dedicated Australian Children’s Network. Mr. Rudd remains engaged in a range of international challenges including global economic management, the rise of China, climate change and sustainable development. He is on the International Advisory Panel of Chatham House. He is a proficient speaker of Mandarin Chinese, a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University and funded the establishment of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. He was a co-author of the recent report of the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Global Sustainability – “Resilient People, Resilient Planet” and chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Fragile States. He also remains actively engaged in indigenous reconciliation.

Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki

Former Ambassador of Japan to the United States (2008-2012)

Ichiro Fujisaki is currently President of America-Japan Society in Japan. He is also a distinguished professor of Sophia University and Keio University, both in Tokyo. Additionally, he is advisor to the metropolitan city of Tokyo.

Fujisaki served as the Ambassador of Japan to the United States 2008 through October 2012.
During this period, there were frequent changes in Japanese leadership, but he stayed on as a point person between Japan and the United States. Fujisaki was instrumental in bridging Japan and the US following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that occurred in March 2011. He frequently appeared on all forms of media, including national TV news shows. He was engaged in all of Japan’s negotiations with the US on security and trade issues, including Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) consultations. Fujisaki has visited nearly all the fifty states, has met with local leaders, and has appeared on local media outlets.

Fujisaki is well connected to Japan’s political, bureaucratic, and business circles, having served more than 40 years in the Japanese government. As the Deputy Foreign Minister, he served as Prime Minister Koizumi’s personal representative to the G8 Summit as Sherpa. He was Japan’s chief trade negotiator and headed the teams for Free Trade Area agreement negotiations with the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. He has initiated and headed Deputy Ministerial dialogue with China. He also frequently traveled to India to lay the groundwork for large scale infrastructure projects which are currently underway. Fujisaki joined the Foreign Ministry of Japan in 1969 after passing the High Level Diplomatic Examination. He has served 20 years abroad and 23 years in Tokyo during his career.

Fujisaki is married to Yoriko Kashiwagi, daughter of Kazuko and the late Yusuke Kashiwagi, who was the CEO of The Bank of Tokyo.　They have two daughters, Mari and Emi.

Ambassador Swanee Hunt

Former Ambassador to Austria; Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy, Adjunct Faculty, Harvard Kennedy School

Swanee Hunt, Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy, was the Founding Director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School. She is currently core faculty at the Center for Public Leadership and senior advisor to the Working Group on Modern Day Slavery at the Carr Center for Human Rights. She has taught The Choreography of Social Movements at Harvard College and lectured at Harvard’s business, law, divinity, and education graduate schools.

An expert on domestic policy and foreign affairs, Hunt also chairs the Washington-based Institute for Inclusive Security, conducting research, training, and advocacy to integrate women into peace processes. Her seminal work in this area began when, as the US Ambassador to Austria from 1993 to 1997, she hosted negotiations and international symposia focused on stabilizing the neighboring Balkan states and on the encouragement of women leaders throughout Eastern Europe. Building on her extensive work with US non-governmental organizations, she became a specialist in the role of women in post-communist Europe.

Raised in a corporate family in Dallas, Texas, Hunt made her mark as a civic leader and philanthropist in her adopted city of Denver, where for two decades she led community efforts on issues such as public education, affordable housing, homelessness, women’s empowerment, and mental health services for two mayors and the governor of Colorado.

Ambassador Hunt is a specialist on women in politics, conducting research, training, and consultations with women leaders in some 60 countries. Working with an advisory team of 40 national leaders from both political parties, she serves as convener of a non-partisan effort to double the number of women elected to the highest levels of US government. She is also active in Democratic politics, focusing on increasing diverse representation and bringing together supporters, political leaders, and candidates. During Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, she co-organized Serious Women, Serious Issues, Serious Money, a Denver symposium widely considered the first time such diverse women gathered to provide major financial backing for a national political campaign. In 2008, she convened Unconventional Women, a day-long program featuring more than 20 female political leaders for an audience of 3000 in Denver, concurrent with the Democratic National Convention. She then co-created Women’s Voting Circles, engaging more than 1200 activists to bring 10,000 of the least likely to vote women to the polls for President Obama. Hunt is also leading a national action plan to stem the rise in prostituted sex through a market model that addresses not the supply but the demand, using changes to legislation and law enforcement practice as levers for change.

Hunt is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; she has authored articles for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Huffington Post, et al. Her first book, This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, won the 2005 PEN/New England Award for non-fiction. Her memoir, Half-Life of a Zealot, was published in 2006. Her third book with Duke University Press, Worlds Aparts: Bosnian Lessons for Global Security, is coming out in July 2011. She is currently writing Rwandan Women Rising.

Hunt holds two master’s degrees, a doctorate in theology, and six honorary degrees. She has received numerous awards from groups as varied as the United Methodist Church, United Way, Anti-Defamation League, American Mental Health Association, National Women’s Forum, International Education Association, Boston Chamber of Commerce, and International Peace Center. In 2007, Hunt was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. A composer and photographer, she is a trustee of the Free for All Concert Fund, building a $20 million endowment to ensure that all individuals in the Boston region will have regular and permanent access to the rich world of classical music. She was married for 25 years to Charles Ansbacher, international conductor and founder of the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, and the Free for All Concert Fund. Her world includes their three children, and a menagerie of cat, parrot, horses, bison, and grandchildren.

U.S. Ambassador, ret. J.D. Bindenagel

Former U.S. Ambassador; Henry Kissinger Professor for International Security and Governverce, Bonn University

Ambassador Seiichi Kondo

Special advisor to the Minister for Foreign Affairs; Specially-appointed professor at the University of Tokyo; Former Commissioner, Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan

Graduate, Faculty of Education and Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, University of Tokyo. 1972, with Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan including: Ambassador, UNESCO; Chief Negotiator for international trade negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda of World Trade Organization and for the Japan-Chile Economic Partnership Agreement; First Director-General, Department of Public Diplomacy; Director-General, Department of Cultural Exchanges; Deputy Secretary-General, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris; Deputy Director-General, Economic Affairs Bureau; Counsellor for Public Affairs then Minister, Embassy of Japan in Washington; 2008, Ambassador to Denmark; since July 2010, Commissioner, Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan.

Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth

Former U.S. ambassador to South Korea; Senior fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School; Dean Emeritus, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

Stephen W. Bosworth is the Dean Emeritus of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a position he assumed in February 2001. Prior to his appointment at The Fletcher School, he served as the United States Ambassador to the Republic of Korea from November 1997 to February 2001. Most recent, from March 2009 through October 2011, he served as U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy for the Obama Administration. From 1995-1997, Mr. Bosworth was the Executive Director of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization [KEDO], an inter-governmental organization established by the United States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan to deal with North Korea. Before joining KEDO, he served seven years as President of the United States Japan Foundation, a private American grant-making institution.

He also taught International Relations at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs from 1990 to 1994. In 1993, he was the Sol Linowitz Visiting Professor at Hamilton College. He has co-authored several studies on public policy issues for the Carnegie Endowment and the Century Fund, and, in 2006, he co-authored a book entitled “Chasing the Sun, Rethinking East Asian Policy.”

Ambassador Bosworth has had an extensive career in the United States Foreign Service, including service as Ambassador to Tunisia from 1979-1981 and Ambassador to the Philippines from 1984-1987. He also served in a number of senior positions in the Department of State, including Director of Policy Planning, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs. He is the recipient of many awards, including the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Diplomat of the Year Award in 1987, the Department of State’s Distinguished Service Award in 1976 and again in 1986, and the Department of Energy’s Distinguished Service Award in 1979. In 2005, the Government of Japan presented him with the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star. In 2010, he was the recipient of the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award which challenges and inspires those whose moral courage, personal integrity, and passion for scholarship, research, and teaching be dedicated to solving the most pressing problems facing the world.

Bosworth currently serves as a member of the Board of the Japan Society of Boston and is a director of the International Textile Group. In addition, he is a member of the International Advisory Board for Olympus Capital. He is a director of the Franklin Templeton Investment Trust Management Co. (Korea) and the Franklin Templeton Sealand Fund Management Co., Ltd. (China). He is also a member of the Trilateral Commission. Ambassador Bosworth is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary society with members who are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs, which recognizes achievement in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. It is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of the world’s complex and emerging problems.

Mr. Bosworth is a graduate of Dartmouth College where he was a member of the Board of Trustees from 1992 to 2002 and served as Board Chair from 1996 to 2000. He is married to the former Christine Holmes; they have two daughters and two sons.

Bonnie S. Glaser

Senior Adviser for Asia, Freeman Chair in China Studies; Senior Associate, Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) Pacific Forum

Bonnie Glaser is a senior adviser for Asia in the Freeman Chair in China Studies, where she works on issues related to Chinese foreign and security policy. She is concomitantly a senior associate with CSIS Pacific Forum and a consultant for the U.S. government on East Asia. From 2003 to mid-2008, Ms. Glaser was a senior associate in the CSIS International Security Program. Prior to joining CSIS, she served as a consultant for various U.S. government offices, including the Departments of Defense and State.

Ms. Glaser has written extensively on Chinese threat perceptions and views of the strategic environment, China’s foreign policy, Sino-U.S. relations, U.S.-China military ties, cross-strait relations, Chinese assessments of the Korean peninsula, and Chinese perspectives on missile defense and multilateral security in Asia. Her writings have been published in the Washington Quarterly, China Quarterly, Asian Survey, International Security, Problems of Communism, Contemporary Southeast Asia, American Foreign Policy Interests, Far Eastern Economic Review, Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, New York Times, and International Herald Tribune, as well as various edited volumes on Asian security. Ms. Glaser is a regular contributor to the Pacific Forum quarterly Web journal Comparative Connections.

She is currently a board member of the U.S. Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and she served as a member of the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board China Panel in 1997. Ms. Glaser received her B.A. in political science from Boston University and her M.A. with concentrations in international economics and Chinese studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Dr. Patrick M. Cronin

Senior Advisor and Senior Director, Asia-Pacific Security Program, Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

Patrick M. Cronin is a Senior Advisor and Senior Director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Previously, he was the Senior Director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at the National Defense University, where he simultaneously oversaw the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs.

Dr. Cronin has a rich and diverse background in both Asian-Pacific security and U.S. defense, foreign and development policy. Prior to leading INSS, Dr. Cronin served as the Director of Studies at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). At the IISS, he also served as Editor of the Adelphi Papers and as the Executive Director of the Armed Conflict Database. Before joining IISS, Dr. Cronin was Senior Vice President and Director of Research at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

In 2001, Dr. Cronin was confirmed by the United States Senate to the third-ranking position at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While serving as Assistant Administrator for Policy and Program Coordination, Dr. Cronin also led the interagency task force that helped design the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).

From 1998 until 2001, Dr. Cronin served as Director of Research at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Prior to that, he spent seven years at the National Defense University, first arriving at INSS in 1990 as a Senior Research Professor covering Asian and long-range security issues. He was the founding Executive Editor of Joint Force Quarterly, and subsequently became both Deputy Director and Director of Research at the Institute. He received the Army’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award upon his departure from NDU in 1997.

He has also been a senior analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, a U.S. Naval Reserve Intelligence officer, and an analyst with the Congressional Research Service and SRI International. He was Associate Editor of Strategic Review and worked as an undergraduate at the Miami Herald and the Fort Lauderdale News.

Dr. Cronin has taught at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and the University of Virginia’s Woodrow Wilson Department of Government.

He read International Relations at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, where he received both his M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees, and graduated with high honors from the University of Florida. He regularly publishes essays in leading publications and frequently conducts television and radio interviews. In addition to many CNAS reports and numerous articles, his major publications include: Global Strategic Assessment, 2009: America’s Security Role in a Changing World; Civilian Surge: Key to Complex Operations (co-editor); The Impenetrable Fog of War: Reflections on Modern Warfare and Strategic Surprise; The Evolution of Strategic Thought: Adelphi Paper Classics; and Double Trouble: Iran and North Korea as Challenges to International Security.

Professor Ezra Vogel

Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, Harvard University

Vogel succeeded John Fairbank to become the second Director (1972-1977) of Harvard’s East Asian Research Center and Chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies (1977-1980). He was Director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs (1980-1987) and, since 1987, Honorary Director. He was Chairman of the undergraduate concentration in East Asian Studies from its inception in 1972 until 1991. He was Director
of the Fairbank Center (1995-1999) and the first Director of the Asia Center (1997-1999). Vogel was Chairman of the Harvard Committee to Welcome President Jiang Zemin (1998). He has also served as Co-director of the Asia Foundation Task Force on East Asian Policy Recommendations for the New Administration (2001).

Drawing on his original field work in Japan, he wrote Japan’s New Middle Class (1963). A book based on several years of interviewing and reading materials from China, Canton Under Communism (1969), won the Harvard University Press faculty book of the year award. The Japanese edition of his book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (1979) is the all-time best-seller in Japan of non-fiction by a Western author. In Comeback (1988), he suggested things America might do to respond to the Japanese challenge. He spent eight months in 1987, at the invitation of the Guangdong Provincial Government, studying the economic and social progress of the province since it took the lead in pioneering economic reform in 1978. The results are reported in One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform (1989). His Reischauer Lectures were published in The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia (1991). His most recent publication is Is Japan Still Number One? (2000). He has visited East Asia every summer since 1958 and has spent a total of over six years in Asia.

Vogel has received honorary degrees from Kwansei Gakuin (Japan), the Monterrey Institute, the Universities of Maryland, Massachusetts (Lowell), Wittenberg, Bowling Green, Albion, Ohio Wesleyan, Chinese University (Hong Kong) and Yamaguchi University (Japan). He received The Japan Foundation Prize in 1996 and the Japan Society Prize in 1998. He has lectured frequently in Asia, in both Chinese and Japanese.

From fall 1993 to fall 1995, Vogel took a two-year leave of absence from Harvard to serve as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council in Washington. He directed the American Assembly on China in November 1996 and the Joint Chinese-American Assembly between China and the United States in 1998.

Michael H. Fuchs

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategy and Multilateral Affairs, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, U.S. Department of State

Mike Fuchs is Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategy and Multilateral Affairs in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. From 2009-2013, he served as Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for Strategic Dialogues, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State, and Member of the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff.

Previously, Mike has held positions as Associate Managing Director for Energy and Environmental Policy at the Center for American Progress, Deputy National Security Director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential campaign, Co-Director of the Democracy and U.S. Foreign Policy Project at The Century Foundation, and as a foreign policy research associate at the Center for American Progress. He is co-author, with Morton H. Halperin, of The Survival and the Success of Liberty: A Democracy Agenda for U.S. Foreign Policy. Mike is a graduate of Columbia University.

Professor Kosaku Dairokuno

Dean, School of Political Science and Economics, Meiji University

Currently Dean of the School of Political Science and Economics. After he earned his BA at the School of Law, Meiji University, he has shifted his focus of study from law to political science. He earned his MA in Comparative Politics at the Graduate School of Political Science and Economics at Meiji University. And, immediately after he completed all the necessary course work for Ph,D, he was given a position of lecturer at the School of Political Science and Economics. He has been with the same school ever since. In the meantime, he was a visiting scholar and professor at various institutions such as Asian Pacific Studies Institute of Duke University, the Department of Politics of Northeastern University, the National School of Public Administration of Laos, and the National University of Laos. Currently he has been studying the relationships between “political corruption” and the structure of government.

Professor Suzanne P. Ogden

Professor and Interim Chair of Northeastern University’s Department of Political Science

Professor Suzanne P. Ogden is a Professor and Interim Chair of Northeastern University’s Department of Political Science. Professor Ogden’s areas of study include comparative politics, Chinese politics, democratization and development in China, international relations, US-China relations, and US policy towards Asia.

During her career, Professor Ogden has written and edited numerous publications, which include Inklings of Democracy in China and China’s Unresolved Issues: Politics, Development and Culture. Professor Ogden has also held positions as: Research Associate at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research; as a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University’s Wolfson College; Visiting Scholar at National University of Singapore’s East Asian Research Institute; Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Oriental Studies; Fulbright Lecturer at the Foreign Affairs College of the Chinese Foreign Ministry; as a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Contemporary China; and, as a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

Currently Professor Ogden teaches both graduate and undergraduate level courses on international relations, urban planning in China, Chinese politics, and Chinese foreign policy. Professor Ogden holds a PhD from Brown University.

Professor Richard N. Rosecrance

Adjunct Professor, Harvard Kennedy School; Research Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles

Richard Rosecrance is an Adjunct Professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, a Research Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was formerly a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., Professor of International and Comparative Politics at Cornell University. He served in the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State. He has written or edited more than a dozen books and many scholarly articles. The singly authored works include Action and Reaction in World Politics (1963); Defense of the Realm: British Strategy in the Nuclear Epoch (1968); International Relations: Peace or War? (1973); The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (1986); America’s Economic Resurgence (1990); and The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and Power in the Coming Center (1999). The edited volumes include The Dispersion of Nuclear Weapons: Strategy and Politics (1964); The Future of the International Strategic System (1972);America as an Ordinary Country (1976); The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy(1993); The Costs of Conflict (1999); and The New Coalition of Great Powers(2001). He is the principal investigator of UCLA’s Carnegie Project on “Globalization and Self Determination”. He has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, Fulbright, NATO, and many other fellowships. He was President of the International Studies Association and served as Director of UCLA’s Center for International Relations from 1992 to 2000. He has held research and teaching appointments in Florence (the European University Institute); Paris (the Institut de Sciences Politiques), London (Kings College London, the London School of Economics, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies), and Canberra (The Australian National University). He has lectured widely in East Asia and Europe. His recent book on the “virtual state” has been translated into Japanese, Chinese (Taiwan), German and will shortly appear in Arabic and Mandarin and in a French volume of colloquy and comments of French scholars entitled “Débat sur L’État Virtuel“. Professor Rosecrance is now at work on a book on international mergers which compares U.S. with European political and economic strategies.

Professor Jin Canrong

Professor for International Relations; Associate Dean, School of International Studies, Renmin University of China

Prof. Jin is a professor and Associate Dean with the School of International Studies at Renmin University of China. He is also a visiting professor at the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, and the Weilun Chair Professor at Tsinghua University.

His education background includes a B.A. from Shanghai Fudan University in political science, a M.A. from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), and a Ph.D. from the School of International Studies at Peking University. Before joining Renmin University, he worked for the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) from 1987 to 2002. His studies focus on American politics (US Congress in particular), American foreign policy, Sino-US relations and China’s foreign policy. His main publications include 50 academic papers, 7 books and 5 translated books. As the first columnist in international politics in the mainland China, Prof. Jin wrote for the column of Focusing on America on World Affairs (a half-monthly), from 1995 to 1998. His social positions include: Vice-President of the China National Association of International Studies; Adviser of the policy planning office at the National People’s Congress; Standing Councilor of the China Reform Forum, etc.

Dr. Hoang Anh Tuan

Head of the Institute for Foreign Policies and Strategic Studies, Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam

Dr. Hoang Anh Tuan is currently Director-General of the Institute for Foreign Policy and Strategic Studies, the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam. He served as Minister Counselor at the Embassy of Vietnam in Washington DC from March 2007 to September 20010. Before taking up his position at the Embassy of Vietnam, Dr. Hoang was Deputy Director-General and Director of Research of the Hanoi-based Institute for International Relations – the predecessor of the Diplomacy Academy of Vietnam and a leading Think-tank on international relations in Vietnam. He got his Undergraduate degree at the College of Foreign Affairs, Hanoi. He then got his Master and Ph.D. degrees at the Fletcher School of law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Dr. Hoang was a visiting fellow at various research institutions, among which are the Institute of International Peace Research (Norway), the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Dr. Tuan has dozens of published nearly thirty articles on Politics and Security and East Asia and US Foreign and Security Policy.

Marie Danziger

Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Marie Danziger, Lecturer in Public Policy. Her teaching, research, and consulting explore policy communication skills and strategies for leaders, managers, and advocates. She has designed a women’s leadership curriculum for Radcliffe and taught management communication at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Previously she taught policy analysis and persuasion at Radcliffe and communications and cross-cultural studies at Harvards School of Education, Boston University, the universities of Sydney and Geneva, and the Instituto Chileno-Norteamericano in Santiago. She was also a journalist and coeditor of a bilingual news magazine in Munich, Assistant to the President at Bentley University, and Assistant Dean for Academic Support at MIT. She holds a PhD in narrative theory from Boston University and is author of Text/Countertext and coauthor of Communicating in Business Today.

Dr. Anders Corr

Principal, Corr Analytics Inc.

Dr. Elliot Salloway

Chief Operation Officer, Boston Global Forum

He has lectured worldwide in his profession and for five years at the Miami Historical Museum on his photographs of the changing Miami River.

He is prolific photographer and painter who has shown in galleries in Boston ,Miami ,Berlin ,Krefeld Germany and Hanoi.

Richard Pirozzolo

Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Founder and Managing Director, Pirozzolo Company Public Relations

During the mid-1990’s, Dick figured prominently in fostering reconciliation and trade with Vietnam, building US public support for accepting Vietnam as a Most Favored Nation trading partner and launching trade initiatives in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, including the watershed VietnAmerica Expo – Hanoi’s official welcoming of US business. Additionally, he promoted successful trade initiatives with Vietnam on behalf of The State of Hawaii, Smith & Wesson, Syratech, the USA’s largest housewares company, and J/Brice Design International, Inc. the Boston and Dammam, KSA-based hospitality design and development firm.

In addition to establishing profitable relationships with Vietnam business and government entities, Dick arranged for positive media coverage of Vietnam by the world and US press – from Agence France Press and NHK to NBC Nightly News and Time Magazine. Additionally, his bylined articles, photos and op-ed pieces on Vietnam public policy and trade have appeared in the Washington Times, Insight, Transpacific, The Advertiser, Beverage World, Vietnam Business Journal, Destination Vietnam, The Boston Sunday Herald, Trade Show Week and PR News.

Dick brings high-level public relations, issues management and relationship-building skills to every client engagement. His recent work includes fostering carbon-offset trading on behalf of Trayport (GFIG/NYSE) and Foreign Exchange trading in Asia for FCM360, Inc. His earlier work includes public relations management positions with Boston University, where he was on assignment with the US Federal Court-Appointed Experts during Boston’s court-ordered and controversial school desegregation. Dick was a daily newspaper reporter with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and a freelance writer for national magazines. He is author of four successful nonfiction books on homebuilding and design and of For All the Years, a history of television in New England.

Llewellyn King

Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Co-Host and Executive Producer of “White House Chronicle” — a weekly news and public affairs program airing on PBS

Llewellyn King is the creator, executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle,” a weekly news and public affairs program,now in its 17th year on PBS.

In addition to broadcasting, King writes a weekly column for the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate and The Huffington Post.

King likes things that move : light airplanes, boats and horses.

Linda Gasparello

Co-Host and General Manager of “White House Chronicle” — a weekly news and public affairs program airing on PBS

Linda Gasparello began her career in journalism as a reporter for Forbes in New York, and associate editor of Forbes in Arabic, the business magazine’s annual Arabic language edition.

After joining King Publishing Group, Gasparello edited a number of industry newsletters and White House Weekly.

For five years, she and Llewellyn King co-anchored “The Bull &The Bear,” a stock market program that aired on the Jones and GoodLife cable television networks. She has been a commentator for the BBC Radio, RTE, Polish TV and Voice of America.

Gasparello received her bachelor’s degree in Arabic from Georgetown University. She was awarded a graduate fellowship to study Arabic at the American University in Cairo.

Barry Nolan – Former Host of the shows “Nitebeat”, “Backstage”, and “Backstage with Barry Nolan”, Comcast Cable CN8 channel

Barry Nolan is an American former presenter on Comcast Cable’s CN8 channel, once hosting the shows Nitebeat and Backstage, and Backstage with Barry Nolan. He is a regular panelist on Says You!, a weekend radio word quiz show carried on many public radio stations but produced by Pipit and Finch.

Nolan hosted Boston’s version of Evening Magazine for WBZ-TV (Channel 4) from 1980 until 1989. He left in 1989 and hosted a series of one hour specials for ABC titled “Over the Edge” He served as a correspondent for the Fox Network’s “Beyond Tomorrow” for a season and then for Paramount Television he was the host of Hard Copy from 1990 to 1998. He served as Senior Correspondent for Extra! from 2000 until 2003. He then moved to CN-8 as an Executive Producer and host of “Nitebeat.”

From Jan 2009, until Jan 2011, Nolan served as Communications Director for Joint Economic Committee of Congress. In 2012, Nolan and his wife Garland Waller produced the documentary film, No Way Out But One

Holly Morrow

Fellow, The Geopolitics of Energy Project, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Holly Morrow has expertise on Asia and energy issues from both the private and public sector. As former senior adviser for the Asia Pacific at ExxonMobil, she was responsible for analysis and strategy for the company on Asian political and economic affairs. Morrow served in a number of policy roles in the US government, including National Security Council Director for Southeast Asia, the Vice President’s Special Advisor for Asia, and China Desk Officer and Analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the US State Department. She received her MA from Harvard University and her BA from Georgetown University.

Zengke He

Director, China Center for Comparative Politics & Economics in Beijing; Rajawali Fellow, Ash Center, Harvard Kennedy School

Zengke He is the Director of the China Center for Comparative Politics & Economics in Beijing as well as the Deputy Director of the Center for China’s Government Innovations at Peking University. He received his PhD in political science from Peking University in 1991. He was a visiting scholar at Bradford University and Nottingham University in the UK (1997-1998) and a trainee for executive development courses at Duke University (2005).

His research interests include corruption and anti-corruption, political reform and government innovation, civil society and social reform. Professor He has authored ten books and over 170 academic articles. He is the author of New Path of Anti-corruption: Study on the Issue of Corruption in Transitional China (Beijing: Central Compilation & Translation Press, 2002) and his latest book is Studying on China’s Social Reform (Beijing: Law press, 2013).

Ling Chen – Rajawali Fellow, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation; Harvard Kennedy School.

Ling Chen recently received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. She was previously a Shorenstein postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. Her research interests include politics and political economy of China and East Asia and her articles have appeared in New Political Economy, Politics & Society, Review of International Political Economy, and The China Journal.

The Emerging Overbalance of Power

by Admin | Sep 6, 2014 | News

(BGF) – On the American Interest, Richard Rosecrance shared his view on Overbalance of Power in reference to maintain peace and security in the world, and its change through time. He also gave his thoughts on China’s intention towards the overbalance of western power.

Richard Rosecrance is the adjunct professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and also Research Professor of Political Science at the University of California and Senior Fellow in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He also is a major contributor to the Boston Global Forum in building a Framework for Peace and Security in the Pacific.

Click here to read the full article published in the American Interest.

The Emerging Overbalance of Power

(August 22, 2014) – When good guys have preponderant power, things tend to be all right—even with a Chinese accent.

Vast accumulations of power in world politics invariably come crashing down, or at least that is the conventional wisdom of most historians and realist policy analysts. Any “overbalance of power”, whether in the form of powerful regional or global empires, hierarchic dynasties, or other kinds of hegemonic orders, eventually bites the dust because efforts to counterbalance ultimately succeed. If nature abhors a vacuum, international politics punctures an imbalance; imperial nabobs and other over-reachers always get their comeuppance.

If the lesson stopped there, things would be oh-so-simple and clear. Yet balance-of-power systems fail, too, because of the inherent rivalries they provoke. As shown by the constant tension engendered by the rise and fall of great powers, bipolarity is the least stable of systems, though based on an ostensible balance of power. The systems fail because one member (or set of members in alliance) strives for primacy, and a mere balance does not deter action by either side. The fact is that we live in a war-prone state system no matter how we arrange its power geometry—and the jury is still out on whether weapons of mass destruction have changed anything in that regard.

The matter does not end there. It begins anew when we ask: How is peace spread over any given region of the world? It is done by getting nations to join and cooperate within what becomes a huge overbalance of power. Indeed, an overbalanced peace born of voluntary cooperation is vastly better than a balanced one born of mutual fear. Overbalancing can be good if it comes into being in a certain way to serve certain purposes. But how, more specifically, do we distinguish good from bad overbalances, and, insofar as their dynamics go, how do we separate justifiable from illegitimate uses of force on behalf of maintaining or protecting an overbalance of power?

In judging whether an overbalance is good or bad for peace and security, the means of augmenting power are the main determinant. The European Union is an overbalance of power in its region, and it is a good overbalance because none of its members has ever been coerced to join. It operates consensually.

In other cases, the means of creating an overbalance may be in some sense illegitimate according to the norms of the day, but the ultimate effect can still be beneficial. Every state, after all, is an “empire” of sorts by origin. Most are formed through aggrandizement, whether of territory, people, or even other states. Yet depending on its behavior, a state may become a boon. It was not for nothing that Machiavelli commented about 500 years ago that all benign political orders rest on antecedent crimes. Thus the United States now owns about half of what used to be Mexico, but it is difficult to argue that the U.S. Southwest or its original inhabitants’ progeny have suffered as a result of the transfer of power. As Hobbes showed in Leviathan, even smaller states are in effect empires in the sense that civil society—once set up as part of the social contract—becomes a hierarchical overbalance of power to protect citizens from violent death only at the cost of their personal sovereignty.

Click here to continue reading.

Sedex: Supply Chain Transparency, Collaboration Essential for Worker Safety and Rights

by Admin | Mar 6, 2014 | Highlights

(Photo Credit: Munir Uz Zaman / AFP)

By Philip Hamilton

(BGF) – Recently, the Boston Global Forum was fortunate enough to interview Mark Robertson, the Head of Communications at Sedex Global. Sedex Global is a non-profit organization that works to enhance global supply chain transparency through audit information-sharing and collaboration between buyers and sellers. Following the recent tragedies in Bangladesh, supply chain issues, particularly in the context of worker safety and rights in the Ready Made Garment sector, have re-emerged at the forefront of international consciousness.

In response to the increased international scrutiny of safety issues in the garment sector, auditing of supply chains has become a widely recognized and publicized solution to concerns that governments, and major brands and retailers are sourcing from suppliers who operate in unsafe conditions. This concern has proven to be all too real for the United States Marine Corp and Walmart, who allegedly purchased goods from suppliers who utilized Tazreen Fashions Factory and Rana Plaza, respectively. Without absolving the major retailers, brands, governments, and others who source from suppliers who operate in questionable working conditions, a major issue is the increasingly complex web of global supply chains.

As Robertson noted, the scale and complexity of global supply chains presents a key issue for many companies: “Some of our members have as many as 20-30,000 suppliers globally, indirectly employing hundreds of thousands of people. So how do you put together a supply chain program that’s going to deal with that scale and complexity? So I think scale and complexity can be things that companies don’t necessarily know how to deal with and that’s often the starting point for Sedex’s work with them.” That level of complexity in global supply chains creates a scenario in which unauthorized sub-contracting can creep into a company’s supply chain, a well-known issues in Ready Made Garment sector.

Moreover, increased international scrutiny regarding supply chain sustainability has led to an emphasis on understanding the totality of a company’s impacts on worker safety and rights, whether those impacts are direct or indirect. Robertson noted that traditionally, companies might only assess their direct impacts as part of their corporate social responsibility programs. However, the more complex the supply chain, the more complex the impacts a company may have. Thus, a deeper understanding of a company’s global supply chain can further elucidate the impacts a company is having on worker safety and rights.

As a result, it is vital that companies, retailers, and brands map their supply chain and look as deeply as possible into who their suppliers are and who their suppliers work with. Complex global supply chains consist of multiple tiers of suppliers. The first tier supplier is likely to be in direct contact with the buyer (company, brand, retailer). Furthermore, that first tier retailer, as Robertson noted, may simply be an agent who then contracts that work out to other suppliers. When this is done transparently and the buyer is made aware of this arrangement then this does not present much of a difficulty, although it makes the supply chain increasingly complex. However, companies often do not look much further than their first tier supplier and are thus unaware of the work and safety conditions further down their supply chain.

Relatedly, Sedex’s research has shown that risks increase further down the supply chain, most likely because “…often the suppliers are smaller, they don’t necessarily have the tools, the resources, or the knowledge even to tackle these issues or they’re nearer to the risks.” Thus, by linking members who are buyers and members who are suppliers Sedex allows for collaboration, information-sharing, and transparency thereby illuminating supply chain risks across multiple tiers.

Given all of above, are audits the answer to improving worker safety and rights? Yes and no. According Robertson audits are “…play a vital role in highlighting where the risks are and identifying actions that need to be addressed. But it’s also important that companies look beyond simple compliance models and work toward best practice.” Thus, audits can play a significant role in illuminating risks in supply-chains and allowing brands and retailers to be “…more proactive and less reactive” in preventing future tragedies. However, audits alone are unlikely to be enough. Therefore, according to Robertson, it is important to couple capacity-building programs with the audit process.

Going forward, Robertson warns that we must not focus exclusively on the issues in Bangladesh, to the exclusion of issues occurring elsewhere. Certainly, the focus on Bangladesh is important, but it is not the only country hosting complex global supply chains. Furthermore, Robertson emphasizes that continued collaboration is necessary: “What about the risks that exist in other garment producing countries such as India, China, Pakistan, Turkey or Vietnam? We don’t need 50 new initiatives to tackle these issues, we need to see more people working together around them.” With the one year anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse looming on the horizon, it remains to be seen whether the world can come together to prevent future tragedies in the complex global supply chains we all rely on.

Transcription: Interview with Sedex’s Mark Robertson

by Admin | Mar 5, 2014 | Highlights

The Boston Global Forum (BGF) was fortunate enough to be able to speak with Mark Robertson, the Head of Communications at Sedex Global. As Mr. Robertson outlines below, Sedex Global is a non-profit organization that aims to enhance global supply chain transparency through audit-information sharing and collaboration between buyers and sellers. The following is the interview transcription containing information on Sedex Global, global supply chain transparency, the challenges of audits in the Ready Made Garment Sector, and the importance and relevance of supply chain transparency and audits for worker safety and rights.

Mark Robertson: Sedex is a global, not-for-profit organization. This is actually our tenth anniversary year. Basically we were set up ten years ago around a simple aim and that was basically, to address duplication in supply-chains. So the initial aim was around ensuring that, basically, buyers were experiencing difficulties in that they were being asked to be audited many times by their customers. For some suppliers that could mean responding to thirty or forty audit requests a year, for example, often from a similar set of customers all looking for similar types of assurances. So, Sedex was originally set up to tackle duplication in the supply-chains, so that was really about looking at how can we create a system globally to enable a supplier to go through the audit process once and then share that information about their ethical or responsible sustainability performance with multiple customers at the same time. So Sedex was, in its first incarnation, set up as an information exchange, if you like, a better way of connecting buyers with suppliers and suppliers with buyers. Uniquely, it was actually instigated by suppliers almost from a bottom-up approach. So rather than the traditional top-down “we’re a global brand and we want to look down our global supply-chain”, that was part of the process. In helping brands to do that we were looking at what needs to happen from the top-down but also from the bottom-up. So that’s kind of what Sedex was set-up to do. The way Sedex works is buyers and suppliers join as members. Globally now we have over 33,000 buyer and supplier members and they span 25 different industry sectors and over 125 different countries, so we operate in different parts of the world and different regions. We’re headquartered in the U.K., we have an office, in the U.S. and in China, representatives in Latin America and also throughout Europe as well. In terms of our membership we have three categories of members. We have buyers, so they are all of the worlds big, global brands are Sedex members. They join to track, manage, and respond to risks in their supply-chain and we probably have about 4-500 of them. Then we have people who kind of sit in between, so they are a buyer and a supplier. They could be a very large company like PepsiCo who is supplying into supermarkets, Walmart, whoever, but equally they have a very complex supply-chain in their own right. Then we have the vast majority of our members who are suppliers. In essence, the way it works is, from a buyer perspective they join Sedex, we help them map out their supply-chain, they see which suppliers are already on Sedex, if they’re not they reach out to the suppliers or we do that for them or they do that themselves. In joining, when their suppliers come aboard to Sedex they go through a self-assessment questionnaire, and then they go through a risk-profiling tool and if that throws up concerns the buyer will then commission an audit on that supplier. If their supplier is already on Sedex then the likelihood is they’ve already been audited and that’s where the efficiency comes in. That’s the broad sense, or the core part, of what we do, but we do many other things as well. We are a team of 50 people, we do a lot of work around publications, light advocacy work, we have a stakeholder engagement team so we’re constantly working with stakeholders from the U.N. Global Compact through to government agencies around the world, regulatory bodies, and that’s about sharing our expertise on global sourcing and responsible sourcing issues, but also about sucking in intelligence to make what we do more effective. So, that’s a bit of background about us. It’s interesting actually, we’re gearing up for our 10^th anniversary event and we have a members forum every April and this year we’re celebrating our 10^th birthday. We’re collecting thoughts from some of our members on that and somebody said, “Sedex is a cool idea, if it didn’t exist, you’d invent it” and I think that kind of sums up quite nicely the essence of elements of what we do. So that’s a bit of background on us and as I’m talking through the questions let me know if there’s other bits that don’t quite make sense.

Boston Global Forum (BGF): Okay, based on that background actually transitions pretty well into the first question. So, Sedex provides tools that help companies pre-screen, manage, engage, and audit their supply-chains. However, sub-contracting is a key issue, particularly in the garment industry in Bangladesh. How do your tools/services handle the issue of sub-contracting within global supply-chains?

Mr. Robertson: That’s an interesting challenge and question. So, basically, a unique part of what we do is around multi-tier supply-chain transparency. The way Sedex as a system tackles that issue is by enabling buyers to go beyond the first tier of their supply-chain. What that means in practice is, if I’m a clothing retailer and I’m sourcing from Bangladesh, Viet Nam, China, Pakistan, you name it, then I can use Sedex to reach out to the first tier supplier, so that could be an agent and then I would encourage them to join Sedex if they weren’t already a member and link to them. Then I can send a signal for them to tell me who their suppliers are and then so on and so on and so on. So the way Sedex works is, it enables the linkages between buyers and suppliers but beyond the first tier, if that makes sense. So I would make say to my first tier supplier, who often is an agent so they’re not making anything, they’re just fielding work and say “who are you using and where are they? And are they a Sedex member?” Then they would link to the underlying supplier and that supplier could link to their underlying supplier and so on and so on. And, actually, without sounding too promotional, that’s quite a unique element of the Sedex system. We’ve done research quite recently that shows, basically the way Sedex works is it’s a mechanism, amongst other things, for sharing audits, it means we sit on a huge, global pot of data, thousands and thousands of audits that can often act as a global barometer as to where standards are at. You imagine lots of audits being shared looking at lots of issues, so we can see what the issues are, how often the audit non-compliances occur and how long it takes them to be closed off and all those kinds of issues. But what we found is, in relation to your question, that the further you look down the supply-chain generally the risks increase. So, if you move beyond one supplier, and you can imagine why, its because often the suppliers are smaller, they don’t necessarily have the tools, the resources, or the knowledge even to tackle these issues or they’re nearer to the risks. So that’s how Sedex works. It’s really about cascading information down the supply-chain and being able to link suppliers together beyond the first tier. So that’s how we handle it I guess, if that answers your question.

BGF: Yeah, fantastic. So basically you’re shining a light a lot further down the supply-chain than previously had been done in a lot of instances that way you can see and unravel where the sub-contracting would be occurring and get deeper into where the risk might be.

Mr. Robertson: Yeah, and it’s not perfect but it gets you that bit nearer to where the risks are. Alongside that, the other kind of thing that we do as well is we run various programs and initiatives to push best practices in auditing. We have something called SMETA [Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit], which is a Sedex Audit Methodology, one of the most commonly used globally now. Within it that we highlight the needs to go beyond tier-one suppliers, we have working groups of auditors around the world now that we convene to share best practices, so there are various things that we do as an organization, not only to facilitate the technical aspects of how to get beyond tier-one and deal with issues of sub-contracting, but around developing best practice guidance as well. That’s your working groups, SMETA, and the publications that we produce as well.

BGF: Kind of building off of that, what in your experiences, or Sedex’s experience, are the most common issues and trends that prevent individuals and companies from fully understanding or recognizing the safety issues in their supply-chains?

Mr. Robertson: I think sometimes it’s a lack of knowledge. Are you talking from a buyer’s perspective, from a supplier’s perspective, or both?

BGF: Probably more from a buyer’s perspective, but I think both would be relevant.

Mr. Robertson: I think, firstly, almost cultural differences. So, for example, in the States, and correct me if I’m wrong, but from our perspective understanding and concerns around environmental issues in the supply-chain are something that gets slightly more widely acknowledged whereas ethical and social issues perhaps aren’t always as readily embraced, or haven’t been anyways, by companies in the U.S. Whereas in Europe, that’s been slightly different. Even within Europe there are different issues that are of more concern to some companies, so there are certainly cultural differences. I think sometimes there’s also, when companies start to look at this, they don’t know where to start because I think the issue of scale is often under-appreciated by companies. Some of our members, they talk about working with 20-30,000 suppliers globally indirectly employing hundreds of thousands of people. So how on Earth do you put together a supply-chain program that’s going to deal with that scale and complexity? So I think scale and complexity are often things that companies don’t necessarily know how to deal with. I think sometimes, perhaps traditionally as part of their CSR approach have focused primarily on their direct impacts but I think there’s a growing amount of pressure now internationally for companies to look more at their indirect impacts through their supply-chain. Often that is more around environmental sustainability issues but increasingly there is pressure for companies to look far beyond that. So, I think it’s a combination of cultural approaches, not necessarily knowing how and where to approach the issues, how to deal with issues like complexity, how to get beyond tier-one.

BGF: The next question I have is that critics often raise the concern that safety audits are ineffective given that factory owners can often hide violations on the audits giving the false impression of compliance. When Sedex is helping out with audits are there any measures that can be put in place to ensure that violations do not remain hidden from auditors?

Mr. Robertson: Yeah, always a problem, things like double bookkeeping or going through to misunderstandings culturally depending on what part of the world you’re looking at. Again, it’s an issue. The kind of thing that we do to tackle that are around the training, and awareness, and capability building programs I was talking about. So we have something called the Associate Auditors Group which started off as a U.K. working group comprised of global audit companies, individual auditors as well, we also have NGOs who sit on that group, and of course buyer and supplier representatives as well. The group, we have a U.K.-based group but we’re also establishing groups in China and Latin America as well. Basically, that’s about looking at auditing challenges generally and coming up with a better way to do things in particular around transparency and pushing those kinds of agendas. So we do that. SMETA, which is the audit methodology I was telling you about, has particular guidance on that very issue as well. I suppose we’re doing more of it as well, we’re constantly looking at how we develop the Sedex system and the resources we provide as well. The other kinds of things we’re looking at are more resources for suppliers to help them appreciate the benefits of a more ethical way of doing business, you know the business benefits of responsible sourcing. That said, audits aren’t perfect but there are things that you can do to make them more effective as a tool. I suppose the things I’ve just listed out are resources we’ve put in place as well. It’s really about going beyond compliance and looking at the other issues, how do you work with suppliers to increase their capacity and get them onboard with responsible sourcing? Well, audits can flag the issues you need to look at but you need focus on things like training, capacity building programs, and all that kind of stuff.

BGF: Building off of that as well, I was reading in some of Sedex’s research that workers’ organizations, particularly women’s organizations, are marginalized in the Garment Industry audits in Bangladesh. Do your capacity building programs focus on ensuring that workers’ and women’s organizations are not marginalized during audits in the Ready Made Garment sector?

Mr. Robertson: That’s quite a big issue to tackle. One of the things we do is when a supplier comes onto Sedex they initially go through a self-assessment questionnaire and that’s a key process. Within that we do track gender specific data, so we look at gender split for example. So that enables that supplier’s customers to understand what the gender split is there and whether or not there are issues stemming from that. We also look at seasonality, which is relevant to particular industries or sectors. For example, tea pickers in the tea trade are often women and so seasonality data and employment rates enables buyers to focus their attentions on programs they have around gender equality and gender issues to focus their attentions at the right time. Generally, what we also do through SMETA and our Supplier Workbook is flag the issues that may or may not be relevant within any given sector and we do look at women’s rights and gender related challenges in supply-chains as part of that as well. So we provide guidance. It’s really about looking at that issue within the context of other issues and thinking about the data you need to focus your attention. Again, the challenge you have if you’re a medium to large-scale global business is the scale and complexity of your supply-chain. What you have to have in place first is the right understanding and the transparency you need to understand who’s employed, how they’re employed, and when they’re employed. Then you can start focusing on the issues you need to hone in on.

BGF: One finding that I found particularly interesting in some of Sedex’s research as well was that there isn’t as much variation in fire safety non-compliance between different sectors and industries as one might expect. Given this finding, that there’s not much variation in fire safety non-compliance between industries and sectors why do you think fires in the garment industry, in particular, receive so much attention when there are almost equally as many instances of violations and non-compliance in other industries and sectors?

Mr. Robertson: I think there are a number of reasons. I think the severity of fire safety hazards varies, obviously. There are all sorts of ways to answer that question. Firstly, there’s the fact that the garment sector often involves countries that are developing economies, or frontier economies, so obviously you’ve got Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Viet Nam. You often find that in those countries the garment sector, or the clothing trade, is often one of the first industries to go in. So, often the kinds of challenges or level of industrialization that is encountered, it’s kind of early stage. The very nature of the clothing sector is that the risks are high. The way in which, if you think about the factories involved and the way clothes are manufactured and made, then fire safety is a particularly relevant and critical risk. And when things do go wrong, you’re often talking about hundreds and hundreds of people working in a factory, in cramped conditions, with lots of material around, you know fires can very quickly take hold and if the right safeguards aren’t in place, very quickly turn to a loss of life. Of course, that can be the same in other factories in other sectors but I think the risks are particularly high in the garment sector. Also, other things such as media scrutiny and NGO awareness has all helped to shine a spotlight on the global garment trade as well. So there are a number of factors that have come into play. I think it’s a combination of factors but really, critically fire safety risks are particularly high in the garment sector. I think that’s why, quite rightly, it’s received a lot of scrutiny. Also, to be honest, high-profile tragedies have helped to raise awareness.

BGF: Well, in the wake of the recent tragedies in Bangladesh that really pushed the garment industry back into the forefront of international consciousness, as I’m sure you’re aware, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety and the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety have both sprung up. Their purpose are quite similar, in a way, to Sedex’s purpose which is to create a common standard so that the garment industry isn’t necessarily dealing with so many differing audits and standards that they have to cope with, which seems pretty similar to what Sedex is trying to do, trying to minimize the duplication of the audit procedure. So, given that similarity, does Sedex have any advice for the Alliance and the Accord in their efforts to increase safety in their supply chains?

Mr. Robertson: Again, I suppose this is where I might want to give you a more considered response, but a first stab at answering that is, so are you talking about the next question as well, which is: is it important to have a common set of standards? Or do you want me to answer that separately as well?

BGF: You can answer that as part of this as well because I think they’re related.

Mr. Robertson: Yeah, I think they are. Obviously, the Accord and the Alliance are slightly different in their approach and the commitments they place on signatories, but a good example of collaboration and action. There’s lots of ways in which buyers and suppliers can collaborate together but the Alliance and the Accord are a good example of retailers being mobilized around Bangladesh, in particular. I think one concern that I would have on that is that’s great on one level but do we need an Accord and an Alliance for the world, globally. Is there a risk that too much attention is being focused on Bangladesh at the expense of other areas? So I think, perhaps kneejerk isn’t the right term, but it’s important that we use this as an opportunity to get a better understanding of risks globally, not just in Bangladesh. Standardization, or having a common set of standards, reducing duplication, obviously is great because it introduces efficiency. All workers in all sectors deserve a basic standard of health and safety and deserve the right to work in safe environments. I think if you are talking about a common set of standards it’s important that these introduce the efficiencies that you want them to but that they can also bend and flex to meet the requirements in different sectors and industries as well. I think standardization is good but it’s important that there are mechanisms to enable different standards to be used as well. I don’t think you’re ever going to get to a point where one overall audit approach is going to cover absolutely every single issue. What you do need are good ways of sharing that information and creating efficiencies and getting buyers and suppliers working together. To a certain extent, yes, it’s very important [to have a common set of standards], and that’s certainly what we’re working towards, but you also need ways for other types of information to be shared and for other standards to be used more appropriate as well.

BGF: So, as Sedex noted in its Fire Safety Briefing the Ready Made Garment industry is a powerful economic force in Bangladesh. What steps do you recommend companies take when implementing changes or improvements based on audit findings so that workers who rely on the industry are not harmed in the process?

Mr. Robertson: I am not quite sure what you mean there.

BGF: Okay, what I am trying to get at is, based on audit findings companies will pull out of a particular factory. But there will be potentially hundreds of workers who rely on that factory for their employment. So pulling out that factory, for example, might just result in mass unemployment for the people who were depending on that job, thereby harming the people that we’re trying to help. So, I was wondering if Sedex takes note of that, and if there are any recommendations that Sedex makes to companies so that when they’re implementing changes based on audit findings they don’t just have a quick, rash reaction that actually does more harm to the people than maybe a more considered reaction might?

Mr. Robertson: Yeah, that’s interesting. I suppose we wouldn’t as an organization necessarily make recommendations on that basis because that’s not quite the way we work. Having said that though, our members forum that I was telling you about at the beginning of the conversation, that’s one of the issues we’ll probably be looking at, I would’ve thought within the context of the things we’ll be discussing during the day. I suppose based on our membership and using Bangladesh as an example, or the other things that have happened, there are different ways in which members would choose to react to that. Some may decide that, rather than moving out of an area where standards are questionable or where there’s been some kind of supply-chain disaster, be it a factory collapse or a fire or whatever, the best thing to do is to take their business elsewhere. Others would decide that’s not necessarily appropriate and they want to remain and improve standards. I think there are different ways of looking at both approaches. So, yes you could argue that it’s better to stay put and drive improvements as much as you can. I think it’s important to appreciate the factors which contribute to problems in different parts of the world. So, they can be things that are within the control of a buyer to consider but often not. I mean, if you look at building safety in Bangladesh, for example, or the context of the factory collapse. Obviously it was a poorly built building but the way in which factories have evolved and developed, you have mixed-use buildings, you have a lack of building codes which contributed, you have the fact that certain buildings have been built on improper foundations, you have corruption, you have bribery, you have lack of enforcement of local regulations, as well as sometimes not being careful enough to think about where you’re sourcing from as well. So, I suppose what I’m saying in a very roundabout way is, I don’t mean necessarily Bangladesh here, but removing your business from one part of the world or one region, sometimes people do do that because they cannot be confident or they cannot be certain that their basic requirements have been met. So, while it sometimes might look like you’re taking the easy option, actually sometimes it isn’t. I think often it’s quite a considered decision. If you really cannot be certain that even the most basic requirements or elements of your responsible sourcing policy are being met and you’re not even confident that you can work to get them there, do you stay or not? It’s an interesting question I guess. Likewise, in other parts of the world or other sectors, other members or other companies would decide that actually they do see worth in collaborating and driving standards. You do see two approaches but I think the context of both sometimes, you have to look at the wider picture I think.

BGF: Yeah, it’d be quite context specific.

Mr. Robertson: Yeah, I think so. You know, you’ve got to think about the impacts that you can have as well. Another advantage of the Sedex model is that by working with Sedex, as a buyer in particular, you’re working towards a common set of standards, you’re working towards a common set of goals and it means that suppliers aren’t getting as many mixed messages and it’s creating coherence. So I think there’s those kind of advantages in working via our platform.

BGF: Excellent. I just have one final wrap up question that will leave room for some final comments. What do you see as being some of the biggest challenges facing audits and monitoring in the Ready Made Garment Industry?

Mr. Robertson: That’s a big challenge. Firstly, I think a big challenge is being more proactive and less reactive. Obviously, it’s great to see so much effort and focus on Bangladesh, but what about the supply-chains in other garment producing countries? I think the challenge is really making sure that we are getting multi-tier supply-chain transparency so that we are looking beyond first-tier suppliers to properly get to grips with risks that exist further down the supply-chain. I think creating consistency and convergence is really important. We don’t need 50 new initiatives to tackle these issues, we need to see more people working together around them. Also, I think, perhaps being a bit more long-term in our thinking, sustainability challenges as well. Cotton, for example, you have sustainability pressures around the availability of raw materials, water scarcity, labor standards, security of the supply-chain, security of the workforce, there are a whole myriad of different risks that exist whether you look through an environmental focus or a social focus as well. Of course, globalization can quickly create new challenges and new patterns of trade so companies source from different parts of the world and their supply-chains can shift quite quickly sometimes, so I think it’s keeping track of that as well.

BGF: Fantastic, that sounds excellent. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. Your comments have been extremely enlightening and really helped clarified some of my thinking on this.

Transcription February 19th: Best Practice Companies on Worker Rights and Safety

by Admin | Feb 25, 2014 | Highlights

(BGF) – On February 19th, 2014 we launched a program to recognize the companies that promote worker safety and rights through the use of best practices. The program launch was introduced by Governor Michael Dukakis, three-term Governor of Massachusetts, 1988 Democratic Presidential nominee, and Chairman of the Boston Global Forum. In addition, the event featured contributions from Hedrick Smith, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winner and former reporter and editor at the New York Times, Arnold Zack, a world renowned arbitrator and Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, and Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, the Executive Director at MassCOSH. The video of their contributions is available here and, for your convenience, the transcript is provided below.

I. Event Introduction: Governor Michael Dukakis

Professor Patterson: Good morning and welcome to the Boston Global Forum on worker rights and safety. It’s part of our yearlong effort to promote discussion and awareness of worker issues in the aftermath of last year’s tragedy at Rana Plaza. I’m Tom Patterson, a co-founder of the Boston Global Forum and I’m on the faculty here at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. I’ll moderate the program this morning and you’ll be able to hear from people who know a lot more about this issues than I do. We’re going to be talking about the issue generally and also to announce an initiative where we’re going to try to recognize companies that have exemplary records in this area. You’ll be hearing first from Governor Michael Dukakis, 1988 Democratic Presidential nominee, two-time Governor of Massachusetts. Mike is on the faculty at Northeastern University where he directs a center on urban and regional policy which bears his name and that of his wife Kitty. Mike, who is the envy of us who’ve been working through these northeastern snowstorms, also has a faculty position at UCLA, where he is today. Governor Dukakis is Boston Global Forum’s Chairman and a co-founder. Governor, good morning.

Gov. Dukakis: Tom, good morning. It’s good to be able to greet you from sunny California where the temperature will be 75 today. We were thinking of all of you in the northeast. Kitty and I will be back in April, about the time the magnolias will be blooming along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, so we look forward to seeing you. I want to greet all of our participants, viewers, and listeners. Many of you were involved in our first online conference on the 18^th of November and you know, as Professor Patterson has pointed out, that the Boston Global Forum is designed to bring people together around major issues affecting our international community. For reasons that I think should be obvious to everybody, especially as a result of the disasters in Bangladesh, we decided to pick international occupational safety and health standards as our first topic. That was the topic of the wonderful discussion we had online with hundreds of you on the 18^th of November. For those of you who are interested, the transcript and the audio from the conference can still be found on our website. You will find that the conference features some really terrific people: Congressman Sander Levin; Senator Tom Harkin; Jeff Krilla, who is the President of the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety; Liana Foxvog, who is the Director of Organizing Communications at the International Labor Rights Forum; and many others. Our conference received good coverage from the New York Times as well.

Now, we’re seeking to build on the success of that first conference by launching a new and exciting initiative to recognize companies who are leading the way through the use of best practices for worker safety and rights. A lot of these companies have gotten real criticism and justifiable criticism but there are companies out there who are doing their best to make a real difference and we want to honor them and recognize them. We’ll be nominating companies, brands, and retailers who we feel are leading the way in the use of best practices. Ultimately we hope that this will result in continued discussion about how brands and retailers can promote worker safety and rights, as well as provide guidance for companies who have not yet adopted these best practices. Bearing this in mind, we are very pleased to have contributions today from Arnold Zack, Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, and Hedrick Smith as part of our launch. We hope that you will continue to engage with us as we seek creative solutions for the issue of worker safety and rights. Thank you all so much for your participation and continued support. It’s just a delight to be part of this online forum today and to listen and learn and we hope act to make this world a better place and to make sure workers all over the world have the kind of protections that they need and they deserve. Tom, back to you.

Professor Patterson: Governor, allow me to ask you one quick question. What is the rough timeline on nominations and the opportunity to send us information about companies?

Gov. Dukakis: We’ll be working on this over the next several weeks. We encourage people to nominate companies and individuals who are doing the right thing and we will be brining those nominees to all of you and we hope not only honoring them but holding them up as examples of what we expect from all businesses.

Professor Patterson: Thank you, Governor Dukakis. We’re going to hear next from Arnold Zack, a long-time labor management mediator, a very distinguished career of public service both in the United States and abroad. Arnold teaches at the Harvard Law School where he is Senior Research Associate in the Labor and Worklife Program.

II. Arnold Zack

Zack: Hello. My name is Arnold Zack. I am a mediator and arbitrator of labor management disputes based in Boston. And I have for many years been teaching a course on designing dispute resolution at the Labor and Work Life program at Harvard Law School. I’m very much interested in the area of conflict resolution not merely as a neutral, but primarily because I believe that is a very effective machinery for solving problems of the work place in particular, but problems that through the work place affect the society. The Boston Global Forum is to be commended for looking into this field. And I’m particularly entranced and enthused about the idea of taking leaders of a global issue and testing its applicability for local actions. So think globally and act locally in the Boston, Massachusetts area. And I think we as citizens can have a greater impact than we can by merely giving speeches and writing papers and watching memos about what’s going on in the world.

Let me bring this directly to the issue I want to talk about. And that is what is so relevant for a mediator and arbitrator to talk about what has been going on in, say, Bangladesh and other factories around the world. We all know what has happened to the departure of jobs in the United States, particularly in manufacturing. And we particularly feel sensitive for those here in Massachusetts. I was born in the city of Lynn. And that’s where the shoe industry used to be. And then the shoe industry moved out to St. Louis then it moved overseas. And the current, it’s in a city in Guang Dong, where the fourteen factories produce some 5 billion pairs of shoes a year. That’s the majority of the world’s shoes, are made overseas. So what? We’ve lost jobs. That’s awful. We should bring them back—that’s imperative. But we have to look at what’s going on in the rest of the world and the conditions that are facing these workers who are doing these unskilled jobs. If their conditions can be improved, that is the immediate goal. In the long run, if these countries develop standards that provide workplace safety and provide workplace benefits to the workers, they in turn become almost less competitive. And that is one of the ways that the jobs can be returned to the United States—when the cost of going overseas; the cost of transportation; the tariffs and so on become so heavy that it behooves employers to start thinking about manufacturing in the United States again. So there’s a self-interest for the United States in this, as well as a humanitarian interest in making sure that things go well for workers in developing countries. It’s very hard to police. There are no international laws that deal with these. There is no guarantee that the national laws of these countries where these factories exist are there for the benefit for the workers or are enforced. In too many countries, there’s too much corruption by the [government officials] who are responsible for enforcing the laws. And the brands and the factories that are producing for the brands can turn there heads aside, saying, “It’s not our problem. We have codes of conduct.” And most companies do, saying, “These are the standards by which we expect factories, which produce for us, to treat their employees fairly and to provide decent workplace conditions—and in the case of Bangladesh, a safe environmental conditions and safe factories and building size. But it’s their responsibility—it’s the responsibility of the governments and a lot of these brands. And we will try to monitor these things, but we can’t effectively police the rest of the world. And when you think of companies, brands like Gap and Disney products, produced in more than 10 to 15 factories in over 50 countries around the world. The opportunity for monitoring that becomes very expensive. And the cost of doing so becomes prohibitive. And even if they try their best, they are still unscrupulous, and unfair, and greedy. Factory owners and factory subcontractors who see a fast buck by lowering their costs by taking it out of the hides of the workers by having them work long hours without overtime pay; to having them work in dormitories, or more likely barracks, to cut down their time away for personal needs and to get the most they can out of these workers. Often employing children. And employing people below at legal standards, even in the countries of which they operate.

Now I’ve been involved in this primarily because of my interest in helping to develop dispute settlement machinery, which I’ve done for a number of countries and international organizations. And I have wondered all along as what is the most effective ways of approaching all of this. At the outset, I was entranced by the idea of the brands and their codes of conduct as the way of spreading the good word. And these brands do try. And they are to be commended for that. But it is very difficult for them to police. To the extent that they hire monitors to police their factories or subcontracting factories. There’s never assurance that those monitors are going to give all the bad news to their bosses. There’re certain basic international standards. I started out by saying that there’s no international law, but there are international standards. The International Labor Organization has on its books about 250 what are called conventions that are agreed to by management worker groups and unions and all their member countries. And those are the international norms. They are the standards. They are the conventions. And among those are 8 international codes—conventions—which everyone agrees are the basic standards for fundamental fair play in the workplace. And they include: freedom of association; the right of collective bargaining; gender equity; protection against the employment of child workers; and the protection of slavery—uncompensated workers. Most countries have been signatories to those conventions. Or most countries at least give lip service to complying with them. But the factory owners are not always cooperative. And so they do what they can to enhance their profits—frequently violating these codes. And the monitors surveying what’s happening, they are confronted with double sets of books. And as we can well imagine, they may have some difficulty reporting back to brands, “You’re not doing a good job because Convention 87 and 98 say that you have to give your employees the right to freedom of association and the right to unionize.” And a lot of countries don’t want to do that in their overseas factories. Certainly the factory managers don’t want to do that. Certainly the governments, many of which are corrupt in these host countries don’t want to do that or seek to repress the unions because the unions have the basic building block of democracy as we can look back to Gdańsk and solidarity in Warsaw, which brought the fall of the Soviet Union. Trade unions are the building blocks of democracy. So a lot of companies, a lot of countries don’t want to see trade unions or worker organizations develop. And of course, the workers therefore lose a voice and lose any opportunity for representation to combat violations by their employers or violations by their countries, governments.

So what I think what’s happened in Bangladesh is an awful situation. What happened in terms of the factory destruction and in terms of the impact it’s had on the workers. I have been working in neighboring country Cambodia, where there has been for many years—the ILO has been doing the monitoring and ensuring fair workplace conditions. There is, after the Bangladesh disaster, an ILO effort to begin monitoring what is going on in Cambodia where the ILO does the monitoring and makes sure employees are treated fairly; where there is an arbitration counsel that deals with questions whether or not the employers are acting honestly. And whether or not there are violations of government statutes, and of international norms and collective bargaining agreements. Cambodia has been successful in that despite occasional strikes, which are indeed the mark of a democracy, and there is hope that it will spread to Bangladesh. But at present, it’s difficult to identify who are the good guys in management side in Bangladesh.

When the issue arose and the companies began to try to demonstrate some support of what was going on, the European countries largely created the Accord, in which they committed themselves to be bound by external determinants of what is fair treatment and compensation for the people and families who were lost because of those fires, and the deaths that ensued. Some companies followed the Alliance, which was less responsive in my estimation by saying, “We will set the cap. And we will determine—not any independent government agency—how much liability are members are willing to pay up. So that is the first step. At least the Accord has done well. I applaud the Boston Global Forum in trying to identify the local brands, the local employers, the local factories, the local stores that are selling or making the products of these brands of the companies that are doing well—that are doing good. And I think that the idea of taking an international issue and recognizing those locally, who are living up to standards of fair play and workplace fairness and not destroying the prospects of a fair society deserve some accommodation. And I think the Boston Global Forum is on the right track. Thank you very much.

III. Hedrick Smith

Smith: I didn’t know if you had a specific question, Tom, but the issue you and the Governor had raised and others about worker safety is critical, not just overseas, but in this country as well. It goes into the changing attitudes of, particularly American businesses. To me, one of the most striking things is you’re thinking about nominating companies for good behavior is that it is the European retailers, French, Bonmarché; Spanish company, El Corte Inglés, a couple of British retailers, Primark and Loblaw, that have stepped up and offered funds to help compensate the victims of some of these terrible industrial tragedies in Bangladesh. The American companies have been willing to put up some money to lend to Bangladesh companies if they’ll do something but they haven’t committed themselves in the same way. I don’t think there’s the same sense of responsibility. American companies, American CEOs, retailers don’t seem to want to accept the same kind of accountability and responsibility as some of the Europeans have. It seems to me that it may be critical to see why that’s the case, what’s happened, and if you’re thinking about generating the kinds of incentives and the kind of political, economic, and social context for dealing with this issues more constructively. Back to the long-term trend that we’ve had in this country for off-shoring production; it certainly began in a lot of the retail trade kind of products whether you’re talking about software, socks, or t-shirts or sweaters, or that kind of stuff, or electronic goods. At the same time that we had we had many American companies moving production overseas and buying more products overseas we had this strong trend in America towards deregulation. We did have OSHA set up under Nixon, the Office of Safety and Health Administration, to protect worker safety in this country, but there has been a lot of chaffing, a lot of resentment against that kind of regulation from American companies and when they get overseas they’re freer from that. So, there’s a sense that they don’t have to be as engaged in these issues as they are in America or as they used to be when we used to have what people called stakeholder capitalism operating in America. That is, business leaders who said that the success of the corporations depends on all the groups that have a stake in the success of the corporation and that includes not just owners, and shareholders, and managers but it includes the workers, it includes the suppliers, it includes the creditors, the customers. There was a sense that there was a network around the company and the CEO of the company had an obligation to balance the interests of all these different stakeholders in the company. We’ve moved since then, particularly in America, much less so in Europe and in Asia, toward this concept of shareholder capitalism where the CEO is responsible primarily to maximize return to shareholders and to avoid legal responsibility. I think that’s part of what we confront here when we’re dealing with issues like worker safety in Bangladesh and Vietnam and other countries in Asia, as well as in this country. A focus on the bottom-line rather than a focus on delivering good returns to shareholders while at the same time taking care of the other constituents that constitute the corporation. Finally, there is an attitude it seems to me that is very important and that is that American multinationals now think of themselves as global companies. They don’t think of themselves as national companies rooted here. We have all kinds of statements whether they come from the head of Intel, Craig Barrett at one point said that we could be successful at Intel without hiring another American; and John Chambers said that his company was trying to become a Chinese company; Alex Trotman at Ford says Ford is no longer an American company, it’s a global company. Well, of course, all of these big companies operate in a global environment but the sense that a corporation is a national citizen and operates from a national base tends to give the leadership that they have an obligation to behave well as a corporate citizen in that country. So, it seems to me where you see these European retailers, French, German, Spanish, English, whatever, behaving differently from the American retailers in terms of issues of worker safety abroad, they’re affected by this notion that they’re seen in their home countries as a corporate citizen and that they’re valued by their customers and they’re seen in the marketplace, not just as a company that makes money and delivers goods and services but as a corporate citizen. When that concept of citizenship is vibrant then the impact of consumers who say “wait a second, we don’t want to be buying retail goods made in Bangladesh by producers who essential have blood on their hands for 1,100 hundred workers who died in the collapse of a factory in Bangladesh”, it has an impact on the behavior of those corporate leaders. In America, that connection has gotten weaker over the last 20 or 30 years as we have moved from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism. I think those are all factors and if you’re starting to identify companies that have good records maybe we also need to look at the political, social, and economic market climate in which they’re operating and what the prevailing philosophy is in the various different parts of the capitalist world. Let me just toss those ideas into the hopper.

Professor Patterson: I think those are important ideas. As you were talking I was thinking about the European, American comparison. Of course, Europe has a very different tradition of the relationship between management and labor than is true in the United States, and a much deeper sense also of social democracy where there is a collective responsibility and a collective accountability and looking out for each other. That is a deeper tendency, I think, in the European democracies than here. Do you think the corporate responsibility movement, which is now more than a decade old, do you think that holds any promise as a means of bringing about social change in American corporations?

Smith: Well, it certainly is the one major ray of hope in that regard. The fact that corporations adopt the phrase “corporate responsibility” and the notion of social responsibility. I think the question is, when it rubs up against the bottom-line, exactly what are American corporate leaders prepared to do? It does at least, the notion of corporate social responsibility, provide some leverage for both worker groups and consumer groups to at least enter a dialogue and begin to put some pressure on American corporate leaders to exercise more responsibility, particularly in areas like we’re talking about today such as worker safety and particularly worker safety abroad. The danger for Americans is that we buy from the world we live a long ways away, even though we regard it as one global marketplace and we have a horrified reaction when we see a factory collapse and 1,100 people die in Bangladesh as a result. But that’s news for a day, 2 days, 3 weeks, 4 weeks, 6 weeks and then it tends to get forgotten and unless something like a concept of corporate responsibility becomes part of the ethic, and I think the ethic can start in the business schools. One of the places we need to go, it seems to me, is right where you all are sitting, the business schools up in the Boston area and the business schools certainly in southern California where Governor Dukakis is, are terribly important in terms of what they’re teaching people and whether or not there is some sense of ethical engagement or even some sense of stakeholder engagement. I don’t think that’s being taught very much. Almost every business school can now point to an ethics course but its usually an elective course and maybe you take a look at the enrollments there, they’re nowhere near as much as they are in finance or marketing or other aspects of corporate leadership. So, yes, that’s an opening. There’s got to be a lot more push, a lot more oomph behind it, and a lot more recognition on the part of the public as a whole that the movement to shareholder capitalism and the notion that the shareholder is the only party to which the CEO has any ultimate responsibility, yes they voluntarily do a few other things that make them better citizens, but they only have a responsibility to the shareholder, that’s a highly questionable proposition. It didn’t used to be the case in America, it’s not the case in Europe, and it’s not the case in Asia. We need to be having a debate about that if we’re going to have a discussion about worker safety around the world.

Professor Patterson: I think your point about the public is also an important one, the public both as citizens and consumers and where they fit into this equation. This business culture that we have in the United States goes deeper than the corporations. We saw it playing out last week in Tennessee in a labor vote on the Volkswagen plant when the UAW was trying to unionize that plant. Just the degree to which the different ways labor management is not strictly a labor and management issue, but it’s a larger issue for the society and all the other players that came into it. When you look at it that way, it’s hard to think about how you bring about change in the short-term, or even the medium-term, it looks much more like a long-term proposition.

Smith: Well, you’re talking about social attitudes, which is critical. When you have the leading politicians in Tennessee, the Governor, the Senator, and a number of other politicians actively campaigning against a union vote, which interestingly enough European management, Volkswagen being a German company, was not only accepting of a union vote, but in fact encouraging it. Even after the vote was taken, and there was this narrow defeat of unionization the manager at Volkswagen in Chattanooga said we still want to push ahead and have a German-style work concept. Here you have a concept of management on the part of the German managers that they want to have labor representation in order to deal with issues such as pay, hours, safety, hiring, firing, and that kind of stuff. Whereas, the political attitude is unions are in the way, worker representation is in the way, let management deal directly with the workers. Well, when the management dealt directly with the workers in Bangladesh it didn’t pay any attention to their safety whatsoever. What’s disturbing is that the American companies which were buying products from those Bangladesh factories, which technically had programs that were supposed to monitor the safety of the working conditions in the plants in Bangladesh, or China, or elsewhere in Asia, it turned out that when people looked at them very carefully they weren’t being very aggressively pursued, the oversight wasn’t being aggressively pursued, it got into the area of costs. So if you’ve got a management that is focused exclusively on the bottom-line, you’ve got a problem when safety is going to cost you something and nip into that bottom-line. And then when you get into the problem that you’ve just raised, if domestically the attitude is in many states, so called “right to work states” and Tennessee is one of them, that labor unions are bad and forcing workers into unions and holding union votes are a deterrent, as the Governor suggested, to further expansion of industry in the state, I don’t know how you get the public then concerned about worker safety in a place as distant as Bangladesh. If you’re not going to let the workers in your own state, encourage them to organize and represent themselves, I don’t know how you’re going to have worker interest in a distant country be in the forefront in the mind of consumers. We’ve gotten to the point here where there are only two yardsticks by which we measuring things. Consumers measure them by price: is the price the lowest possible price I can get? Executives and CEOs manage things by what’s the maximum profit I can get. Money is the yardstick. And we don’t just have the problem with Bangladesh. We’re coming up now to this whole issue of the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership that the Obama Administration is negotiating. There are trade unions and others that are very concerned that issues of worker safety are not going to be built into those trade agreements. They look back at what happened with NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, or the trade agreement with South Korea, or some of the Central American trade agreements and they say “look, government policy, not just public attitudes, but government policy is not pushing issues of worker safety and not forcing the same kind of safety conditions in those other countries as a part of our agreement as we insist at home. This is an imbalance, this is not a level playing field, this is going to work to the advantage of low-cost foreign suppliers, it’s going to cause American distributers, retailers, marketing-distribution companies to go overseas for production because their labor costs are lower and part because their worker safety protections are much more lax than ours are. And this is now written into policy. When we’re talking about this issue of worker safety, we’re talking about a whole shift in public attitudes and corporate and even political attitudes that has taken place over the last three decades and you’re talking about reversing that. That’s a big struggle. This is a major problem that the Boston Global Forum has taken on and I applaud the Forum for doing it. These are really important issues but they’re going to be tough and they’re going to take a long time to confront.

Professor Patterson: Well, there’s been very little transparency, as you know, around the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, a very large possible trade agreement between the United States and other countries that share the pacific. At the same time, the Obama Administration has said they’re looking for a “21^st Century trade agreement”, meaning one that’s really forward-looking, one that’s very progressive, one that might include much more substantial protections of workers than have some of the past trade agreements, and also environmental protections. I don’t think that we know exactly what that’s going to look like. [Inaudible] that it’s probably going to come out closer to the bottom than the more optimistic projections on the TPP would suggest.

Smith: Well, the risk here is that as long as the negotiations are handled in private and as long as the administration is pushing for fast-track approval in Congress, which essentially an up or down vote, it means that there is very little chance for outside parties, whether they are environmental groups, labor groups, consumer groups, or just plain other legislators who are concerned about various issues that affect industries in their particular area, there’s very little opportunity to both question it and challenge it when the substance of the trade agreement can be affected. It seems to me, once again, there’s sort of a lockout against these other concerns, against these other issues. If you were thinking about just today worker safety, then why not have the portions that deal with worker safety in the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership negotiation made public so that people can say “is that a reasonable position? Is that a standard we want to live by?” This is a huge trade agreement. Most of the others have been bilateral, so they’ve affected trade with one other country and a couple have affected two or three countries. But this is a huge trade agreement between the United States and an entire region in the pacific, multiple countries. That’s got to be negotiated right. It’s going to become a precedent for lots of other agreements, perhaps the agreement we’re negotiating with the Europeans. Although, in the case of the Europeans, their worker protections are better than ours and more vigorously enforced. We’re not a country that has vigorously enforced labor working conditions. They’re written already into our laws. I mean, OSHA has been pretty effective, but when you look at the H1B visa problem, that is foreigners who are hired by companies to work in America, people from India, people from the Philippines, Russia, Ukraine, elsewhere there is supposed to be a standard that they can’t be hired unless it’s clear that there’s no American available with equivalent skills. Well, the enforcement of that law has been lax ever since it was passed in 1990. There have been multiple reports to Congress about that. Here, we’re not even talking about worker safety abroad, we’re talking about the protection of college-educated, knowledge economy, professional jobs in this economy and the worker protections. The protections there for the American employees have been lax, weak, weakly written into law, and weakly enforced. Again, I’m trying to get at this notion that, in my book I call it Who Stole the American Dream?, it’s not just economics, it’s the conditions under which people are working. It’s been deteriorating in this country over three decades. Jacking it up overseas is going to be tough if we can’t take care of the home front very well.

Professor Patterson: Thank you very much. Governor, do you have any comment or question for Rick?

Gov. Dukakis: Well, I wonder Rick, whether in view of what you said, and it’s really quite accurate, it is time at least to think seriously about some kind of international agreement which sets minimum standards and enforces them. As you point out, at this point it’s a mixed bag, our friends in Europe seem to be taking this more seriously in some ways, although some of the American companies are involved and I think want to do the right thing. As long as there is a place where you can do this on the cheap without these kinds of standards people are going to gravitate there and as in the case of environmental standards we need some kind of international framework within which all companies are expected to meet decent minimal standards when it comes to what’s going on in the workplace.

Smith: I couldn’t agree more, Governor. I think you’re absolutely right. There is a framework, the World Trade Organization, the WTO, is set up for trade agreements but worker safety standards are rarely brought up. There is a lot of concern for protection of copyright and patent, and protection of financial services, and the flow of capital. This is where the big political influence is, certainly in this country but also in other countries as well. Yeah, we do need some international standards or exactly what you said is going to happen. The same thing happens in the tax arena. It’s interesting, we finally have the G20 starting to talk about an international tax regime. It’ll probably take a decade to generate it, maybe more, so that you can’t have companies running around finding tax havens. Well, if they can address that kind of an issue on taxes then why not address a similar issue on either worker safety conditions or environmental concerns. If the G20 starts moving in that direction, it seems to me that it makes a lot of sense. As long as we’re split up nationally people are going to divide and conquer and beggar-thy-neighbor and find the cheapest, least demanding environment for producing their goods or at least getting the goods they want to sell.

Gov. Dukakis: In fairness to the Administration, apparently there are some provisions in this trans-Asia agreement that the president wants fast-tracked, which focus on both environmental and occupational safety and health standards. I don’t know the details but one of the arguments that the administration is making on this is that for the first time, really, these provisions are included in the agreement. It does seem to me that unless there is some kind of international framework, with enforcement, in which all companies and all countries, frankly, are expected to [inaudible] you’re going to have this continuing problem.

Smith: Well, I’d like to be optimistic about what the Administration has said about the labor and environmental portions of the negotiations, but this is not the first time that we’ve been told that by a sitting administration about a trade agreement that was being negotiated. Back at the time of NAFTA, there were concerns raised about some of these same issues and the Clinton Administration assured us that in fact labor standards and environmental standards were being considered. In the ultimate result, the standards were pretty weak, and it’s happened subsequent to that too. I hope you’re right. But the test, really, Governor, it seems to me, would be for them to come out and be public about it. Of course it’s difficult when you’re having multinational negotiations to reveal things at every stage of the game. That’s a formula for getting nowhere, and I can understand that. But, maybe there ought to be preliminary benchmarks where you have a preliminary draft. This happens with federal agencies all the time. We have a big dispute going on now in this country about the IRS issuing regulations on how to determine whether tax-exempt organizations are actually engaged in politics or not. They’ve drafted a bunch of rules, they put them out for public comment, and there are all kinds of comments from both the left and right, people are unhappy. But before they issue the rules, they go through that. Well, why can’t that be done in a trade negotiation? Once the rules are drafted you bring them out and you go back and you redraft them. It can’t go on forever, but at least it gives people a chance to measure just how serious the effort that’s being made and it gives people like the Boston Global Forum and the people who support these objectives to weigh-in and say “Yeah, that’s really good what you’re doing there. We like that” or “That’s not adequate and we need to let people know, and organize, and put some pressure on various governments to tighten up the standards and do better by the workforce.”

Professor Patterson: Rick, thank you very much. This has been very helpful and we can’t thank you enough for participating this morning in the Boston Global Forum. Next we’re going to hear from Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, the Executive Director of MassCOSH, which strives to promote worker safety, security, and health largely in this area of Massachusetts. MassCOSH works very closely with professionals, with unions, and with community groups in trying to seek these goals for workers. Marcy.

IV. Marcy Goldstein-Gelb

Goldstein-Gelb: Thank you, Tom, very much. Two weeks ago, Michael McDaniel went to work at the Natick Department of Public Works as he had for the past 26 years. He never returned home. He was struck by a vehicle and killed while making repairs to a water line. That same week, Brian Smith was cutting a tree down for a tree company when it fell on him, killing him. The week before, Victor Horano was crushed to death in a shucking machine while working at a fish processing plant in New Bedford. Nearly every single week in Massachusetts, a worker goes to work and doesn’t return home. 10 more die from occupational disease. And a thousand suffer serious injuries from their work. Behind those numbers are wives and husbands, children and parents who have lost a loved one and a breadwinner.

Each year family members come together from all around the world to commemorate Workers Memorial Day. In Massachusetts, we hold it on April 28^th in Boston at the State House. And family members come to us and say, “Why did this happen? What can we do to make sure that no other family has to suffer as we have?” Well the first thing we need to do is stop calling these deaths freak accidents. A freak accident means that it has never happened before and it will never happen again. And we don’t need to look at what happened and why. It means we don’t have to figure out what can be done to prevent it in the future. And we know that when federal OSHA investigates, or the state investigates, there’re always safety measures that could be incorporated that would save lives.

The second thing we can do is to make sure that employers are doing everything possible to promote safe, healthy work places. The Boston Global Forum has initiated this effort to look at these best practices so that we can prevent injuries and deaths. So the question is, what are we looking for? Well I’ll begin by sharing a story of something that we see often at MassCOSH. We have what we call a Worker Center and are apart of an immigrant worker collaborative where very low-wage workers come to us because they’ve either suffered an injury or because of very dangerous conditions. And this gentleman Patrick has a story that’s so common that unfortunately we see all the time. He was working on roofs across Greater Boston repairing homes. And working at great heights although the employer failed to provide him with a harness or other safety measures that would protect him and his coworkers. A day laborer, desperate to ensure that he kept his job, he didn’t feel he was in a position to speak up and question whether or not the employer was complying with OSHA or other measures. And one day he fell from the second story and he severely injured his back and legs. Instead of the employer immediately taking him to the hospital. He brought him to his home and changed his clothes to make sure he wasn’t wearing his work clothes. He had his wife bring him to the hospital and claim he was in fact up in a tree, trying to save a cat.

This is a story of the opposite of what we need from employers. It should be no surprise to any of us that when workers work in tenuous employment such as day laborer or temporary work—when there are fewer job alternatives and they can’t simply leave or speak up easily about unsafe conditions. And those who are employed by companies who penalize workers for speaking up about safety, these are at greater risk of injury and death. As the Boston Global Forum scans the landscape of Massachusetts, recognizing employers who observe best practices for health and safety, at the heart must be a work environment that allows for maximum voice and job security. So workers can be a partner in promoting safety and health without fear of retribution. A union collective bargaining agreement ensures that security. Labor management, health and safety committees help ensure that that voice is at the table a culture that encourages the reporting of hazards and injuries. And management and workers that are knowledgeable and well trained about hazards and safety measures trained in the language that they speak. These are some of the components of a safe, healthy workplace. Many of these components are in OSHA’s proposed I2P2, or Injury Illness Prevention Program.

And one other peace of ensuring a safe, healthy workplace is having employers who are willing to speak up and support federal and state measures that promote health and safety. An employer that is truly supportive of health and safety knows that if you have strong standards and good enforcement, that that is going to deter other employers from violating laws. It’s going to actually in fact keep all employers on a level playing field. We’ve seen the case in Massachusetts.

Last year we worked together with employers, with temporary agencies to pass a Temporary Workers Right to Know law that strengthen protection for temporary workers. Prior to that we worked together with employers to pass protections because it was a floor-finishing product that was highly flammable and killing workers. And employers stepped up and said if all of us got rid of this chemical, all workers will be safe. And so we know that strong deterrence is a critical component of a health and safety workplace. We are also very pleased that Boston Global Forum has recognized that workers really play a critical role as well in ensuring a safe healthy workplace. And by speaking up, many of them put themselves at great risk of losing their jobs. And so we need to recognize that bravery by honoring them as well. And so we are very grateful for the efforts of the Boston Global Forum and look forward to working together to ensure that here in Massachusetts across the country and around the globe, workers can go to work and return home safe and healthy. Thank you very much.

Report of Massachusetts on Underground Economy and Employee Misclassification

by Admin | Jan 29, 2014 | News

(BGF)-Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development of Massachusetts released last year a report on the Underground Economy and Employee Misclassification within the framework of the Joint Enforcement Task Force (JTF) on this issue. Accordingly, the JTF was formed to coordinate Massachusetts’ efforts to eliminate employer fraud and employee misclassification.

Apart from pointing out the activities done by individuals and businesses to “avoid one or more of their employer responsibilities related to wages, payroll taxes, insurance, licensing, safety, or other regulatory requirements”, the report also mentions initiatives and accomplishments of the JTF. We would like to introduce here some important points of the report. The original version can be found at http://www.mass.gov/lwd/eolwd/jtf/annual-report-2012.pdf

The Issue in Massachusetts

The “underground economy” is a term that refers to those individuals and businesses that utilize schemes to conceal or misrepresent their employee population to avoid one or more of their employer responsibilities related to wages, payroll taxes, insurance, licensing, safety, or other regulatory requirements. The underground economy also encompasses other activities such as tax evasion, payroll fraud, under-the-table work, and wage theft. These activities may include but are not limited to: paying wages in cash, skimming some or all of the cash takings, not paying overtime, paying sub-minimum wages, charging individuals for transportation or supplies essential to the work, underreporting employees, misclassifying employees as independent contractors, forcing employees to set up shell subcontractor entities, running a part of normal business activities “off-the-books,” not registering a business to avoid tax obligations or to avoid obtaining the necessary licenses and insurance policies. Some unscrupulous employers methodically operate this way as part of their business model; other employers may be unaware of legal complexities with regard to employment laws or feel the economic pressure or incentive to cut corners in their business operations. Whether violating the law knowingly or unknowingly, the lure of more profits, lower costs and less responsibility for workers drives these decisions more frequently. By reducing the amount of money expended for wages, insurance, payroll taxes, licenses, employee benefits, materials and transportation, safety equipment, and safety conditions, these employers can gain a competitive advantage over businesses that comply with business and tax laws and regulations. This results in unfair competition in the marketplace and forces law-abiding businesses to pay greater direct costs to stay in business and indirectly subsidize socialized benefits like health care, unemployment, workers’ compensation, and for those companies and individuals who do not play by the rules.

Individuals who perform work for businesses that do not comply with labor, licensing, and tax laws are negatively affected, often significantly. They are often paid sub-minimum wage, receive no overtime, are denied access to workers’ compensation benefits, Unemployment Insurance (UI) coverage, health care coverage and social security eligibility. Their working conditions may not meet safety requirements, often putting them in danger. Their value is diminished and their ability to economically sustain themselves and their families is put in peril. As a result, other employers and taxpayers are required to indirectly subsidize these liabilities, in the form of workers’ compensation or UI coverage through employer funded trust funds, health care through MassHealth, and other state and federal subsidies.

In addition to the direct negative economic impact to individual workers, these activities also compromise the legitimate business community and the Massachusetts economy. Legitimate businesses are put at an economic disadvantage when competing with other companies who are able to charge less for their work, construction, goods or services because they are not law abiding. Further, legitimate businesses subsidize those entities that do not follow the wage and hour laws, purchase workers’ compensation insurance, or contribute to the UI system, as their dollars are used to provide benefits when there are no employers of record to charge. Taxpayers are also unduly burdened as many workers who are misclassified, paid below minimum wage, or are without employer provided benefits often utilize existing social safety nets. Finally, the sheer number of workers who now fall into the underground economy puts stress on the social safety net and the underlying societal norms that we share.

Massachusetts communities are not immune to the underground economy. Consumers drive the demand for labor, goods, and services, and may unwittingly be contributing to the underground economy through their buying choices. Without realization, consumers may be purchasing goods or contracting for services with entities that are part of the underground economy. In order to increase awareness and to limit the availability of goods and services produced without regard to the wage and hour laws and/or as part of the underground economy, the US DOL has begun to restrict business’ ability to sell these goods through interstate commerce, through what is known as the “Hot Goods” provision under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Massachusetts has been supportive of the US DOL’s efforts and was a major partner in the US DOL’s successful efforts to address this issue in the Commonwealth. Collectively, the costs of the underground economy are high. Operating outside the law allows businesses to have an unfair advantage by illegitimately lowering costs, therefore undercutting their competitors. This takes business away from law-abiding companies and their employees who are trying to make an honest living. This race-to-the-bottom hurts the economy, legitimate businesses, and results in the erosion of the social fabric, economic stability, wage levels and working conditions in the Commonwealth.

JTF Results

The 2012 Annual Report is based on eighteen months of data, broken out between the periods of July 2011 through December 2011, and January 2012 through December 2012.1 During this combined period, member agencies recovered $21,393,652 in wage restitution, state taxes, unemployment contributions from employers, fines, and penalties as a result of referrals and cooperative oversight. Of this total, $5,949,873 was recovered from 07/1/11 – 12/31/11, and $15,443,779 was recovered from 01/01/12 – 12/31/12 (see page 5). Unless otherwise noted, all references to funds recovered represent monies that have been recovered through the cooperative efforts of the JTF and represent monies above and beyond what member agencies collect through their ordinary enforcement efforts.

In its fourth year, the JTF also received 237 complaints through the JTF referral phone line (1-877-96-LABOR), the online referral service (www.mass.gov/lwd/jtf), and complaints made directly to member agencies. The work of the JTF agencies resulted in over 24,000 compliance checks and investigations in the 18 month period, including 17,000 compliance checks in the 2012 calendar year alone.

2012 Accomplishments

During 2012, the JTF had several noteworthy accomplishments:

• The JTF uncovered $1.17 million in unreported wages by subcontractors on the Marriott Copley Place (Host Hotels) renovation project;

• The Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA) found over 2,300 misclassified workers and $11 million in unreported wages in 3 audits over 5 months;

• The DUA recoveries more than doubled from 2011 to 2012;

• The Alcohol Beverages Control Commission (ABCC) licensing compliance checks reaped millions of recovered funds from applicants seeking liquor licenses;

• The JTF launched a research study on the underground economy and employee misclassification;

• Cross-agency training for partner investigative agencies was provided;

• An automated fraud detection technology system was implemented by the DUA to better compile possible audit targets;

• JTF initiated a more robust compliance check system among agencies.

2013 Goals and Initiatives

During 2013, the JTF looks forward to continued success by focusing on the following goals:

• Implement objectives to achieve the strategic goals set by EOLWD to increase transparency in government as part of Governor Deval Patrick’s MassResults Plan;

• Complete the JTF research study on employee misclassification and the underground economy in Massachusetts;

• Create education and outreach material for businesses and workers;

• Continue to provide and expand cross-agency training opportunities;

• Expand JTF partnerships outside the Executive Branch Agencies;

• Further advance technological capabilities for capturing and tracking referrals;

• Build upon existing channels of multi-state and federal cooperation and maximize future potential cooperation.

BGF’s First Distinguished Lecture With Chairman Michael Dukakis

by Admin | Dec 17, 2013 | Boston Global Forum Awards

(BGF) – Mr. Michael Dukakis started BGF Distinguished Lecture Series on December 12 on the occasion of BGF’s first year anniversary. In this lecture, took place at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, he placed emphasis on world peace and how international community can help solve global existing issues to make the world better.

Transcript:

Tuan Nguyen: Welcome. I’m Tuan Nguyen, editor-in-chief of Boston Global Forum. Today December 12th is the first anniversary of the Boston Global Forum. We’re delighted you have joined and sent congratulations to the Boston Global Forum and to Chairman Michael Dukakis to Boston Global Forum Distinguished Lecture today. The speaker of the Distinguished Lecture 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 Distinguished Professor of Harvard University, and on the faculties of UCLA and Northeastern University. He also heads the Dukakis Center, located at Northeastern University. I present to you Governor Michael Dukakis.

Gov. Dukakis: Thank you, Tuan and thank you very, very much. It is a pleasure to have an opportunity to share some thoughts and ideas with you about the Boston Global Forum: what it is, what we hope it can achieve, and to invite so many of you through the remarkable medium of information technology to work with us as we build the Forum and try as best we can to make it a major force for a better and a more peaceful world. But let me tell you a little about it. Actually, it is Tuan who deserves most of the credit for creating this. He’s a remarkable person and one of founders of the internet in Vietnam, spends a lot of his time now in Boston, fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, and somebody who I met when we were on the Board of Directors together. And he began talking about his hopes and dreams for what he called and what is now the Boston Global Forum. So what is this idea that he developed and that I Chair and that increasingly is involving many, many of you, not only in the United States but across the globe. Well, we have enormous intellectual resources and I think many of you know here in Boston, great universities, great thinkers, people that have a tremendous amount of expertise in a wide variety of fields. In fact, today we’re at MIT in a very special center that does research into brain technology. And this is just one of dozens and dozens of such centers here in the Boston area. We have many people, obviously, who are deeply and actively involved in international relations and international issues, so we’ve got a wealth of resources here and obviously we want to tap into those resources. At the same time, we want to involve as many of you as possible, both here in the U.S. and across the globe, in working with us on important issues of great international significance. So our hope is that starting with a core group here in the Boston area led by Tuan, and Tom Patterson at the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School, John Quelch, who’s an extremely able and experienced professor at the Harvard Business School, and others we can begin to focus attention. And we want to do so by picking an important issue of international significance, one per year, and focusing intensively on that issue. We’ve just begun that and I’m going to explain to you in a minute just why we picked the issue that we have and what we hope we can do about it.

Now why are we doing this? Well, we’re doing it, in my opinion, against a backdrop of unprecedented international communication in a way that has never existed on this planet, largely thanks to information technology, a world which is getting smaller and smaller in the best sense in which we have the means now to work together, communicate together, reason together, negotiate together, and hopefully build a better and a more peaceful world. And even while conflict continues in many parts of the world, it is increasingly taking place within and not between countries. International institutions, the United Nations on down, are playing a greater and greater and a more important and a more effective role. Unilateral or even limited multilateral interventionism in the internal affairs of a country outside of the United Nations framework is not only not working, and we’ve seen this now repeatedly in the case of the U.S. intervention for example in Iraq and in many other places where countries have sought to intervene unsuccessfully, and it’s increasingly being discredited as a means for settling disputes between and among countries or even within a country, in some cases, where conditions are so bad that international norms are being violated and the international community believes that international action is warranted. While situations like the Iranian nuclear problem tend to get the most attention, action on an international scale has been having profound effects on conditions around the world. Just take international public health. Way back in my youth I had the good fortune to get a scholarship to study in Lima, Peru after my junior year in college. I lived with a Peruvian family and I had a wonderful experience. At that time, one out of every two Peruvian babies never lived to see its first birthday. The infant mortality rate was fifty percent. And in most developing countries of the world that was the norm. Today, infant mortality in Peru is about where it is internationally, dramatically lower than it was then. Why? Because international institutions, international experts, people from all over the world have come together, shared information, and have been able to dramatically reduce the level of disease and ultimately death, especially in children and young people across the globe. All of us know about climate change, about how important it is going to be to develop standards to deal with climate change and they cannot be done on an individual basis. This is something that must be done internationally, working through international institutions. International trade, dramatically bigger and more extensive, in which we hope that we can gain the benefit of free and fair trade and do so while at the same time making sure that the people who make these goods are protected. I’ll have more to say on that in a minute.

The International Criminal Court, my country unfortunately has still not embraced it, but the idea that there are crimes which are crimes against humanity and should be punished internationally, is a relatively new one historically and yet one hundred and twenty-five countries have joined the International Criminal Court and more I hope will. Many of us are strongly suggesting that this latest dispute involving nearly a half a dozen countries in Asia over who owns what island is nothing that ought to be producing the kind of conflict and anger that it is producing. We have something called the International Court of Justice, that’s the World Court, that’s been created to deal with these kinds of issues. I, for one, believe that we should be urging the countries in Asia to go to the International Court of Justice and ask that very important international body to go to work and resolve these differences. This is nothing that ought to create conflict or armed conflict or the kind of pretty angry discussions taking place today and we have an international institution called the World Court that has been created specifically to deal with these kinds of issues. And, in point of fact, as a result of these and other dramatic events that have been taking place all over the world, we are probably closer to a point in world history where war is being ruled out as a means for settling disputes between and among countries than we have at any time in the history of mankind. I, for one, and I just celebrated my eightieth birthday, think this is probably the most dramatic step that has taken place in my lifetime and I think all of us as citizens of our own countries, as well as citizens of the world, have a solemn obligation to continue to try to create a world in which these kinds of disputes can be settled through international institutions peacefully, without armed conflict, and in a way that makes us a better, a more prosperous, and of course a more peaceful world. So, that’s the backdrop within which we’ve created the Boston Global Forum and within which, with your strong participation and involvement, we hope we can play a very constructive role in moving the world forward.

What we’ve decided, as I said earlier, is that we’ll pick an issue and focus on that for a twelve month period. And our planning group here in Boston has decided that that issue this year will be the issue of occupational safety and health in the workplace all over the globe. Now, why have we picked that? First, because, as all of you know, it’s a very serious problem and secondly, because we’re all part of it. Those of us who buy these goods, those who make them, those who sell them, those who process them, those who market them; we’re all part of this problem. None of us can or should think that somehow we can escape responsibility for this. Secondly, as all of us know, tragically, especially but not exclusively in Bangladesh, we have had terrible and tragic results in some of those factories. I know of no one on this planet that thinks that that’s acceptable. Now, on the one hand, we don’t want to punish Bangladesh or other countries so much so that they are badly hurt economically. On the other hand, I personally, and I think an increasing number of people across the globe, think that that kind of conduct cannot be tolerated and we’re not, as consumers, prepared to buy goods and engage in an economy in which the people that are making these things that we buy and we need and that we want are not protected against the kind of thing that has caused now hundreds and hundreds of deaths, not just in Bangladesh, but elsewhere. There are, as I think many of you know, two major private sector initiatives that are underway which have been initiated by industry groups. Certainly all of us hope that they will be successful but, I must say, and this is my opinion not necessarily that of my colleagues, I find it very difficult to believe that we’re going to be able to deal with this problem effectively unless we internationalize it. And we have an example in Cambodia, where, faced with similar problems, working with the International Labor Organization we now have, in that country, internationally developed standards and inspection and enforcement. This seems to have gone a long way toward, on the one hand, protecting workers and at the same time ensuring that they will receive reasonably decent pay for the work that they do. So, that’s one model that I hope we’re going to take more than a quick look at, that we’re going to explore intensively to see whether or not, conceivably, it has international application. Certainly, we hope that the two agreements now that are being implemented in Bangladesh will be helpful. And my hat is off to the people that have worked hard to try to put those together, but I must say I’m a skeptic. If we want a world in which we not only can buy goods that are reasonably priced and of good quality and at the same time help a lot of people in many countries that are quite poor to develop better and more prosperous lives working in those industries, in my view, the case for internationalizing both the standards and enforcement is very strong. We shall see. In the meantime, obviously, I think all of us want to be very supportive of what is currently going on. But, it’s not just Bangladesh, it’s everywhere. Even here in the United States, although our occupational safety and health standards are much tougher, much more effectively enforced than they were certainly forty, or fifty, or a hundred years ago. Nobody can relax under these circumstances. Working people are entitled to a decent and safe workplace and I think all of us feel that no matter where we come from, who we are, and to what extent we are involved in the manufacturing process as well as the consuming process, and all of us are in one way or another.

So, what do we hope we can achieve through the Boston Global Forum, first, in focusing on this important issue and then going on in subsequent years to picking other issues of importance that this approach to problem solving, to discussion, to international collaboration and ultimately I hope to recommendations which have an impact, can achieve? Well, we’re going to encourage lots of consultation and that’s obviously already underway. We want to encourage as many of you as possible to participate in this process, to be part of our conferences, our lectures, the talks that people will be giving online and to come back to us with feedback, with questions, with suggestions, to make this a very collaborative kind of effort. We hope to have a series of online conferences, the first of which we’ve already held and I know some of you were very much a part of that, bringing together the best minds and experience from around the globe. We want to invite key issues and key figures who have been actively involved in these issues, to participate, to debate, and to share their ideas. And, of course, with the miracle of information technology, we can do that at minimal cost, inviting all of you to come to these conferences in a way that doesn’t require you to travel, to spend a lot of money, and yet to participate fully and actively in these discussions and in our development of recommendations for change. Our first conference, as many of you know, was on the eighteenth of November, it involved about one hundred and twenty participants including: members of the United States Congress, at least three assistant secretaries at the cabinet level here in the U.S., representatives of the International Labor Organization, of business organizations that have put these agreements together, legal aid lawyers from Bangladesh who participated actively and very constructively, academic and legal experts, and many others. It was fully covered by the press. I, for one, thought it was a wonderful discussion. It was about a two hour conference, a very good start, and we expect to have our second online conference on the subject of international occupational safety and health standards in February, and we hope that all of you will participate. So, that, in a few minutes, is a summary of what the Boston Global Forum is, what we hope to achieve, and how we hope we can involve many of you, and a growing number of you, in our discussions, in our deliberations, and ultimately in the preparation of recommendations which we can then take to decision makers all over the world. So, we’re delighted that you’re listening today and participating. I know lots of you have questions, and the second half of this lecture of mine is going involve an exchange between us, which I look forward to. Many of you have backgrounds in this field, have actively participated in it, have lots and lots of good ideas and we’re delighted to have you with us. Thanks for being a part of this. We look forward to having you attend and participate in our second online conference. Now, we’re going to go to questions and I’ll do the best I can to see if I can field them and exchange some ideas with you. Thanks very much.

Tuan Nguyen: We have a lot of questions. First of all, we would like to you so much for sending your questions and comments and congratulations to the Boston Global Forum and for Michael Dukakis. Special thank you to Steve Elkins, Farea Ali Múlimi, Rohit Wonchoo, Thomas Peterson, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. They are five Global Thinkers 2013 named by Foreign Policy. So we congratulate and thank you. Now, Jonas will manage the questions together with you with Governor Michael Dukakis.

Jonas Brunschwig: Thank you Tuan. Thank you Governor for taking the time to do this with us and happy belated birthday. We’ve received questions from all over the world in a wide ranging area of topics, going from your work with the Boston Global Forum to the actual issue that we’re focusing on, and then ranging more into your broader career and the way you see the world today. So, we’ll divide them into those groups. So, to begin with the questions related to the Boston Global Forum, the question that goes to the source: what motivated you to Chair the Boston Global Forum?

Gov. Dukakis: Well, apart from the fact that a good friend asked me to do it. As I said in my talk, I’ve been on this planet now for eighty years. I was a child of the Great Depression during the ‘30s, was nine, ten, eleven, twelve during World War II, then it was Korea, then it was Vietnam and more recently, we’ve had other international conflicts. What is remarkable about my lifetime and what has happened here is, first, the creation of international institutions designed to try to resolve differences without armed conflict and, secondly, this remarkable information technology which now makes it possible for people all over the world to communicate in a way that was never possible before. And I’m an inveterate optimist. As I’ve often said you can’t be in politics if you’re a pessimist. If you don’t think that good people working together can make a difference, you’re in the wrong business. I am much encouraged, particularly recently, at what I’m beginning to see happen around the world. I was not a supporter of American intervention in Iraq or, for that matter, Afghanistan except in a very limited way, nor was I a supporter of intervention in Syria, international intervention or intervention of various kinds in Syria. I thought it was doomed to failure and I’m sorry to say that seems to be what has happened. But what is emerging out of all of this, and we Greeks have an old saying that “when things happen you’re supposed to learn from them”, is a growing awareness led, I’m proud to say, among others, by my former Lieutenant Governor who is now the United States Secretary of State John Kerry, that using these international institutions, sitting down together, exchanging information, even if we have ideological differences, is much more likely to lead to peaceful resolution of things than armed conflict, and Iran is a very good example of that. Now, Iran is not easy. I don’t know of too many people who don’t think that if the United States had not overthrown the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 we wouldn’t be dealing with this kind of a problem, but we did. It was a terrible mistake at the time and here we are. But the fact that, thanks in part to the Iranian people in the election of a new president, and obviously their strong feelings that they want a more normal and a more peaceful situation, we’re making significant progress and I hope, and I expect, that it will continue. And that’s just one example. Now, how are we doing it? Through international institutions with international collaboration. I mentioned this current conflict over islands in Asia. Frankly, I think anything like armed conflict over who owns what are largely useless islands is simply unjustified. But, how do we resolve this? It seems to me, we’ve got to go to the international institution which is designed to do that, which happens to be the International Court of Justice. The more of this we can do the better. I talked about international public health, about climate change itself which has to be resolved internationally. There is no way any of us individually can solve this problem unless there are international standards internationally enforced. So, I see a world that, slowly but surely, is beginning to understand that we can resolve these differences peacefully, but we have to sit down together, we have to discuss them together. I hope that the Boston Global Forum can be a very constructive part of that process. That’s my hope, that’s our hope and our expectation, and we’re going to work hard, with the help of all of you out there, to try to make that kind of constructive addition to this emerging consensus, I hope, that we can solve these problems and we don’t have to do so by killing each other.

Jonas Brunschwig: How would you assess the Boston Global Forum’s first year?

Gov. Dukakis: Well, we’re just underway. I loved the conference in November. I’ve been part of a lot of conferences and part of the problem is just the logistics. How do you get people to a place, house them, feed them, and so on and so forth? Here we had an opportunity to have every bit as valuable a meeting with none of that, and what we discovered was that its much easier to get really very good people to participate if they can do it from their desks, their offices, or wherever they happen to be. I thought it was two absolutely fascinating hours. We not only got press coverage but I think involved people in this discussion, people who I had heard about but I had never met or seen in action. My hope is that we can build on that more and more with increasing numbers of folks who will work with us and do so through the miracle of the kind of information technology that now makes it possible for us to do that. So, I’m very pleased.

Jonas Brunschwig: Where do you see the Boston Global Forum in five years?

Gov. Dukakis: Well, we shall see. A lot of this depends on the quality of our work, depends on the numbers of people, I hope in the thousands, that will begin to participate with us, in our ability to provide this kind of international forum in a kind of unprecedented way. This isn’t Davos, but it can be every bit as constructive, if not more so, in a way which engages people everywhere and as I say, does so at minimal costs. So, I’m really quite excited. Of course, this issue of occupational safety and health standards is a test for us: can we engage people, can we involve them, and can we come up with a set of recommendations that’s going to be successful and helpful.

Jonas Brunschwig: Well, you’ve hinted at it a few times, about the conference, that so far we’ve been able to engage with key stakeholders from the business community, from the public sector, from civil society…

Gov. Dukakis: The advocacy community, lots of people who are part of this.

Jonas Brunschwig: How far up the food chain do you think we can bring this?

Gov. Dukakis: We can, I think, engage, as I say, literally thousands of people in these discussions. Obviously, it’s going to be our responsibility to make sure that we manage this process in a way that keeps people actively involved. As somebody who has attended literally hundreds and hundreds of conferences, I was kind of blown away by the ease with which we were able to get lots and lots of people who have been deeply and actively involved in this at our conference, online, and produce what I thought was a wonderful discussion, very interesting ideas, and I hope a start on the way toward a very successful forum process.

Jonas Brunschwig: Do you see our efforts take root within the Government for some concrete initiatives?

Gov. Dukakis: Well, we certainly had people at the conference who have important roles in government, not just in the United States, although we had some very good ones, but all over the world. So, the answer is yes. I see no reason why we can’t have presidents and prime ministers and cabinet ministers and so forth deeply and actively involved in this and I hope we can do that.

Jonas Brunschwig: I guess it doesn’t make sense not to ask you how optimistic you are about the outcome of this process.

Gov. Dukakis: Remember, I remember the world eighty years ago and I remember those terrible wars and some more recently, which seem to me were really quite unnecessary and not helpful in any way. When I think back then and I think now and I see what’s available to us in a way that makes it possible for all of us to sit down together, to reason together, to communicate together, I’m very optimistic. I’m very optimistic. I wish, frankly, I was starting my public career all over again, but I’ve got children and grandchildren who can pick that up along with lots and lots of students that I teach these days. I can tell you, we’re producing wonderful young people in this country and around the globe. They’re very idealistic, they feel strongly about the world that they’re going to be leading and I’m very excited. I’m very excited.

Jonas Brunschwig: We sat down last week with Professor Patterson at the Kennedy School and we talked about his book Informing the News and he brought up a fact that is fairly relevant to the issue of worker safety. He mentioned that issues like worker safety make headlines or make news only when a catastrophe like Rana Plaza happens and there are hardly any labor reporters in newsrooms nowadays. How do you think this could be changed to bring these issues, that are relevant, to people?

Gov. Dukakis: Well, its interesting. Even as the conventional media has covered these kinds of issues less and less, I remember when the New York Times had a full-time and very highly respected labor reporter who did nothing but report on these kinds of issues, even under those circumstances, the social media is kind of picking up on this and providing another kind of an alternative medium for us. But, obviously, it’s our responsibility here at the Boston Global Forum and elsewhere to make sure that the media covers things. I think we had five or six really excellent press people from some of the major newspaper media outlets in on our first conference and I hope we can expand that. So, to a very great extent, we’ve got a responsibility to make sure that they’re covering our conferences, they’re covering these various things that we’re doing. If we do meaningful work and we come up with meaningful kinds of recommendations for change, believe me, they will cover them. Sadly, of course, disasters tend to get more coverage. When I talked about these unbelievable gains in international public health, you don’t read about that very much. We don’t give ourselves credit for that kind of thing.

Jonas Brunschwig: You read a little bit when the MDGs are up in 2015.

Gov. Dukakis: That’s correct. But our job is to make sure that the press does cover these kinds of things.

Jonas Brunschwig: So, if we were able to bring this issue of occupational health and safety, to make it relevant to more average citizens, do you think that they’d be able, with the information, to then take it to the next level and be more conscious in their consumption? Because it seems like the sweatshops and the factories often produce for the cheaper brands, like Walmart and Gap for example, and they cater mostly to the lower income people in the developed countries who tend to be the ones that don’t really have a choice financially.

Gov. Dukakis: Well, they may not have a choice, but in some ways, because they are not affluent, because they are struggling to support themselves and their families, I have found that they are even more sensitive to these issues than people of wealth. And the cost of doing it right is really minimal. I remember, I teach at UCLA in Los Angeles in the wintertime, and I remember the AFL-CIO here in the United States decided to have their mid-winter meetings in Los Angeles. John Sweeney was the head of the AFL-CIO at the time. And, the major goal of the AFL-CIO at that time was organizing strawberry workers in California. We eat a lot of strawberries in the United States. I eat a lot strawberries, I like strawberries. Sweeney told me, and I have not reason to doubt him, that if the strawberry growers agreed to every single demand of labor in these contracts for strawberry pickers and workers, including good benefits, health care, increased wages, all this kind of thing and by the way these issues are back again as we see income inequality growing all over the world, including in affluent countries, he said to me that it would raise the price of a box of strawberries by six cents. I think I know the American people, and I’m sure the same is true elsewhere, well enough to know that they would be more than happy to pay one extra nickel to make sure that the people that are picking these strawberries are getting a decent wage, decent benefits, and protection from environmental issues out in the field in terms of pesticides and these kinds of things. What are we talking about? Five or six cents. I think that’s the sentiment generally. I think paying a nickel so that these folks can have a decent life. And we’re confronting that issue right now, in terms of raising minimum wages and those kinds of things. I think there would be very strong support. Of course, it means we’ve got to inform consumers as to what’s really going on out there and I think most people are appalled at what has happened, not just in Bangladesh, but in other countries. And, by the way, a hundred years ago we were going through exactly this same set of issues here in the United States. The famous Shirtwaist Fires in New York City and the garment shops there which were terrible and triggered an enormous reaction in the form standards here. So, we’ve seen this, we’ve been through it and I don’t think there’s any question consumers would respond positively.

Jonas Brunschwig: Do you think, overall, this might be a good sign even though these terrible things are happening, since they have happened before? It sort of seems like it could be on the path to greater development you have to pass different stages and this is just one of those stages.

Gov. Dukakis: Memories are short. We’ve gone a long way, for example in this country, toward dealing with serious occupational safety and health problems and a much tougher OSHA, as we call it, and enforcement and these kinds of things. But, now production has shifted to other parts of the world and they’re going exactly the same thing. Given our experience and the experience of other more advanced, industrialized countries there’s no reason under the sun why we shouldn’t seek to act, and act effectively, to deal with these problems.

Jonas Brunschwig: I guess we can move on to questions related to the world as you see it today, since we have a lot of questions that fall under that category. Someone suggested that we start with: what do you think is the most pressing issue that the United States is facing today?

Gov. Dukakis: Domestically, I think its income inequality. This is a very prosperous country. We’ve done well, we’ve gone through a very difficult and serious economic recession, which is largely our fault. We forgot some lessons. You’ve got to regulate financial institutions. You can’t let them do what they want to do without regulation. You’ve seen what’s happened. We can’t go back to what I call Herbert Hoover economics. Austerity will not get you out of a depression or a recession and I don’t know why we have to re-lean that lesson over and over again. But, I think gradually people are beginning to understand, both here and in Europe, that austerity doesn’t revive an economy. It just doesn’t and it wont and it’s a dumb strategy. So, making sure that all Americans have an opportunity to work, to work at a decent wage with good benefits, in my opinion, is something of the most important priority but of course that requires an excellent educational system, it requires environmental protection obviously, including collaboration with the world to do something about climate change, which is real, investing in our infrastructure which we are not doing anywhere near as effectively as we might, and quite frankly, significantly reducing military expenditures in a world which is no longer a Cold War world and really has to deal with international problems, including terrorism, in a way that is very different from the way we were dealing with and spending during the Cold War, which is now blessedly over. So those are our problems here.

Internationally, I think the United States, first, cannot be the world’s sheriff. We can’t be the world’s police chief. It’s clear we can’t do that, which means that we must be engaged in a collaborative process using international institutions to resolve these international disputes. And I want to see my country taking a leadership position in doing that, whether it happens to be in the South China Sea or in the Middle East or elsewhere. And I think we can do that.

Jonas Brunschwig: What do you think is the most pressing issue on a global scale?

Gov. Dukakis: World peace and how we not only create the conditions for world peace but then make it possible for people all over the globe to have the kinds of lives that we want for ourselves and our families. And I think we can do that.

Jonas Brunschwig: You’ve mentioned it a few times before, if you want to dive a little bit more into what your thoughts are on climate change and the role that the U.S. has taken up to today and the role you’d like the U.S. to take.

Gov. Dukakis: Climate change is real. I don’t think there’s any question about it. People say “Well, we’re not sure.” Look, if there’s a possibility of climate change, not a probability, which I think is clear, but a possibility, we’ve got to go to work on this. I mean, the future of the planet is being threatened here by our activities. There’s no question that we know how to dramatically reduce the amount of carbon that’s going into the atmosphere, the question is whether we have the will to do so and can we do so again in a way that is collaborative and involves the entire world. We’ve got a job to do, because we produce a lot of the stuff, but so does China, so do a lot of other places. This will not happen without international agreement, international standards, international enforcement and I want the United States of America to be leading that effort.

Jonas Brunschwig: Would you say that the biggest obstacle towards achieving these goals within the United States might be special interests?

Gov. Dukakis: Not so much special interests. We have a conservative community which is skeptical, isn’t quite sure that there’s a scientific basis to this. I respect their skepticism but I think the evidence is now overwhelming. This is not just a figment of somebody’s imagination that may happen fifty years from now, its happening right now. If my fellow countrymen don’t believe it they ought to go out to Glacier National Park, one of our great national parks. Ten years from now there won’t be any glaciers left. So, this is not a fairytale and I think we have to emphasize that. But, it’s our role as an important international leader that is most important here because we’ve got to use our prestige and our influence to move the international community as rapidly as possible toward international standards and enforcement. And I’m not sure the United States, I mean our Congress is still divided on this issue. So, our job, it seems to me, is to persuade people, liberals and conservatives, republicans and democrats alike that this is a real problem, that this is not a partisan issue, and that we have got to get going on it.

Jonas Brunschwig: You’ve mentioned that income inequality is what you see as the number one domestic issue that the U.S. needs to face. There are actually two researchers here at MIT, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee who run the Initiative on the Digital Economy, that have just recently published a book Race Against the Machine in which they argue that technological innovation is advancing at a faster pace than labor can keep up with causing many people to lose their jobs to technology which is sort of one of the many factors contributing to greater inequality. What suggestions do you have to tackle these issues?

Gov. Dukakis: I haven’t read the book, so I don’t want to be unfair, but I’ve been hearing this all my lifetime. That labor saving technology, devices, equipment, procedures inevitably will result in a world in which people wont have jobs and it’s never happened yet. Why? Because even as technology is dramatically reducing labor costs in some areas, its creating new economic opportunities in other areas. These days, we’re applying new technology to the manufacturing process. My hope and expectation is that the United States will get back into the manufacturing game by using these new technologies to bring manufacturing back to the United States because, in fact, we have these new technologies. But, I don’t see the slightest evidence that new technology permanently destroys people’s economic opportunity. Here again, I think history teaches that us that you have got to take advantage of these opportunities, you have got to use this new technology. I don’t think the fact that we still aren’t at full employment in the United States has much to do with the destruction of jobs as a result of new technology. It’s got to do with rather ill advised public policies, in my judgment. We should be investing heavily in this country’s infrastructure these days, and we’re not. It’s those kinds of things that will get us back to full employment, and we’re getting there. But, the idea that technology permanently destroys economic opportunity, I think, frankly, is belied by history.

Jonas Brunschwig: This question comes from a scholar at Harvard who would like to know what you think about city leadership, both on the national as well as the international level? Given that it seems that the world is going through a very intense urbanization phase, with many urban legal frameworks that are not adequately prepared for or funded to deal with externalities such as disasters caused by climate change, the use of resources, safety, or community building.
Gov. Dukakis: Well, I don’t think there’s any mystery about what it takes. It certainly requires resources. There are many countries that don’t have the resources that you’d like to have, but I think we know how to deal with urban problems. Here in the United States, clearly, cities are coming back in a very interesting way and in a much better and a much more exciting way. In other developing countries, as we know, we’ve got cities that are huge, cities that have a lot of poverty, but we know how to deal with these problems. Here again, I think, maybe this is a subject down the road for the Boston Global Forum. How do we deal with urbanization? How do we make sure that our cities are healthy and provide a good quality of life for their people? But, again, I don’t think there’s any mystery about what it takes, the question is are we prepared to do so.

Jonas Brunschwig: I want to go back, again, to something that came up with Professor Patterson’s talk. You’ve been advocating for collaboration on an international level quite heavily throughout your whole career and especially today. Professor Patterson mentioned, on the other side, that there is an increased polarization within politics in the United States, which makes it very, very hard for Congress to collaborate. This Congress is on track to go down as one of the worst, if not the worst, Congress in modern history. How do you see this issue being addressed?

Gov. Dukakis: Well, I have enormous respect for Tom, needless to say, but when people say to me “This is terrible” and “we’ve never seen it so bad” I say to them “Have you seen the movie Lincoln?” That was bad. That was a country that was tearing itself apart and that almost ceased to be a unified country. I lived through the McCarthy period: that was bad. I lived through the whole Vietnam conflict and what it was doing to the United States, tearing this country apart. Talk about a poisonous atmosphere, even within families, where people wouldn’t talk to each other because the kids were opposed to the war and the parents were supportive and so on. We go through these periods from time to time. And yet, we’re finally on the verge of a budget agreement, which seems to be quite reasonable and which I think is the result of three or four very tough years, which have brought us to a point where people are finally willing to sit down, be reasonable, and collaborate, even as the American economy is improving. So, we’ll move through this. We’ve had a big battle, I don’t understand why, over whether or not working Americans and their families should have decent, affordable health care. But that’s being resolved and it’s going to happen. Sometimes these are tough issues and sometimes they can be very confrontational, but I think we’re working our way through this. And, compared to some of the experiences I’ve had, and this is not something to not pay attention to, but this is a set of problems that are a lot easier to resolve, quite frankly, than some of the things I’ve seen in my lifetime. Here again, I’m not happy with what’s been happening but slowly but surely we’re getting there and I think that’s true of other countries as well.

Jonas Brunschwig: So, do you think the two party system is still the best way forward?

Gov. Dukakis: Well, it’s the one we have, it’s the one that, for some reason, seems to be the best way to move forward. By the way, this is very interesting as well: when I was a college student people were bemoaning the fact that the major political parties in the United States didn’t stand for anything because we had liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans and we had liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats. In fact, we had conservative Democrats, mostly in the South, who were also racist Democrats. People said “This is crazy”. You go into the voting booth and you don’t know whether to vote “D” or “R” because what do they stand for? What we need is a realignment of the parties. And there was a fellow Scott Schneider, I think he was at Wesleyan University, who was the principle advocate of so-called Scott Schneider thesis, it was time for the major parties in the United States to become ideologically more cohesive so that when voters went into the voting booth to vote they knew what they were getting: if you voted Democratic you get one thing, you voted Republican you get something else. Well, we’ve done that and now everyone is concerned about polarization. This is a country, on the whole, that’s pretty moderate and sooner or later people are going to be punished if they don’t do the job in a way that builds national consensus and I think we’re beginning to see that and I’m not surprised, but it has taken a while.

Jonas Brunschwig: Going down this economic road, how do you see the new economic movement advocating for employee stock ownership plans, co-operatives institutions, credit unions, with the example of the Bank of North Dakota, public utility companies?
Gov. Dukakis: I’m all for this. I think the more consumers than average people that can be involved actively in the economy in a constructive way, the better. I like co-ops, I like employee stock ownership plans, I like all of this kind of thing and I think the more of that we can do, the better. Now, I don’t know that that will become the dominant model in a place like the United States, or for that matter, elsewhere, but I think all of these things are positives and I think they ought to be encouraged.

Jonas Brunschwig: What are your thoughts on the Occupy Movement? This is a question that somebody strongly pushed.

Gov. Dukakis: It didn’t last very long but I think it brought the issue of income equality up there where it belonged and it’s going to stay there. We’re going to have a flock of minimum wage laws being passed in this country because people don’t think you can live on eight dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, and you can’t. It’s interesting, in the national polls a majority of Republicans, as well as Democrats, support increases in the minimum wage. And, if you ask the American people whether or not working Americans and their families ought to have decent, affordable health care ninety-three percent say yes. Now, I know there’s all kinds of controversy about the Affordable Care Act and that kind of thing, but when you ask people that question: should working Americans and their families, and by the way, it is overwhelmingly working Americans and their families that don’t have health insurance in this country. If you’re on public assistance you get health care. But if you ask the American people that question: should working Americans and their families have decent, affordable health care they’re overwhelmingly for it. And, by the way, not having decent, affordable health care adds to income inequalities. So, I think there’s actually a very broad consensus behind these things and I think you’re going to see a lot of movement in the United States on this subject. And, by the way, income inequality is growing elsewhere in the world, and I think you’re going to see similar kinds of efforts.

Jonas Brunschwig: Well, it looks like we got a live feedback from a former student of yours, Joshua Cooper, who woke up at 4:30 AM from Hawaii to participate, sending his regards. Moving on. Going back to the topic of national security, you have advocated for defense spending cuts. MIT will host a talk tonight on the Snowden affair. What are your thoughts on the NSA and its implications for the freedom of press, freedom of speech? How do you see Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning?

Gov. Dukakis: Well, I’m very concerned obviously [inaudible] condone in an illegal act, but every once and a while somebody engages in an illegal act and suddenly tells us things that we don’t know, and in this case, a lot of things we didn’t know. I don’t know too many Americans, liberals and conservatives alike, who aren’t very concerned about this kind of intrusion into our private lives. I noticed that General Alexander was pleading that we not limit the authority of the National Security Agency. I’m sorry, I’m with two senators who on most issues are poles apart, Pat Leahy and Rand Paul, both of whom are appalled by what’s going on and what limits, and I agree with them. And nobody is going to tell me that we can’t deal effectively with international terrorism without intercepting virtually every message. The other day I was asked whether or not, at a particular press event, would I be willing to talk off the record. I said “These days, nobody is off the record. We’re all being snooped on by the NSA.” So, I think we’ve got work to do. As I say, nobody is going to tell me we can’t protect the security of this country and it’s people and at the same time make sure that our Bill of Rights and our freedoms are not protected. Of course, that’s always the clash. When you get into trouble, you get into war and so forth, there are severe restrictions on the grounds that we’ve got to have them because it affects our national security. So, I’m strongly supportive of efforts, by Republicans and Democrats alike in Washington, to try and deal with this. And, as I say, nobody is going to convince me that this kind of incredible government snooping is essential to our national security. You start chipping away at our individual liberties around here and that is going to have an effect on our national security.

Jonas Brunschwig: On to more frivolous topics, and speculative. Who do you think will be the presidential nominees for the Republican and Democratic parties?

Gov. Dukakis: I haven’t the slightest idea. I think, on the Democratic side obviously, if she runs, Hillary Clinton will be very popular. But as any of us know who have run for political office, what the polls say today have nothing to do with what may happen in two years. On the Republican side, you’ve got a party that is severely split. I’m sure they’ll have a flock of candidates and I wouldn’t even begin to speculate on who that might be. Right now, I think we’ve got some work to do over the course of the next couple of years and we ought to be focusing on that.

Jonas Brunschwig: Who do you think was the greatest American president in history? And, who do you think was the most underrated president in U.S. history?

Gov. Dukakis: Well, certainly, in my lifetime, Franklin Roosevelt was an extraordinary figure. I was just a kid but I remember he had a rare combination of leadership and charisma which made it possible for us to dig ourselves out of the worst economic crisis in history and really to transform American society in many ways. We’re still fighting these battles, as we know. On the other hand, in a personal sense, Jack Kennedy was the president that had the greatest impact on me because he had this rare ability to reach out to young people and to inspire us, and I was one of thousands of young Americans who, inspired by Kennedy’s example, decided to get into politics, to run for office, and to try to exercise what we could in the way of public leadership. Obviously, if you go back in history, a Washington, a Lincoln, these were really extraordinary figures. Lincoln, in particular, who probably had as much to do with saving the Union as anybody. But, FDR was really a giant in the White House and really had a profound effect on this country and its future, certainly in my lifetime.

Jonas Brunschwig: You just mentioned Kennedy also having a great influence, on top, along with Kennedy, who were the biggest influences on you that led you and motivated you to pursue a political career?

Gov. Dukakis: Well, lots of people. All of us have our own history. I had an extraordinary pair of parents, both of whom were Greek immigrants, both of whom came over here and did extraordinary things and were an inspiration for me, obviously, in a variety of ways that I’m not sure I can explain. By the time I was seven, or eight, or nine had me interested in politics and public affairs, amazingly, even at that age. I had a basketball coach in high school who was the first adult who ever said to me, “You ought to run for public office.” Nobody had ever said that to me before and had a great influence on me and on my wife, who was in his homeroom as a freshman when I was a senior in high school. The best teacher I ever had, who taught me French at Brookline High School, left me a thousand dollars in her will when she died with the hope that I would run for the presidency of the United States. Can you imagine that? And a wonderful, wonderful woman. I love languages and she has a lot to do with it. So, there are all these influences. In a political sense though, Kennedy had a rare ability to connect with us young people. And I don’t mean in a personal sense. I don’t think I met him more than twice. But he had this rare ability to reach out to the young people in this country and say “Hey, look, this is important and you should get involved.” He was proud to be a politician. He never apologized for it. He never apologized for being a public servant and it rubbed off on a lot of us. So, it’s a collection of these. I happened to marry a beautiful woman who was as deeply interested in politics and public life as I was, and that’s pretty important. If you have a spouse that doesn’t understand what you’re doing and isn’t supportive and isn’t participating actively that can be pretty discouraging. So, it’s a combination of things, really. And I meet people every day who continue to have an enormous impact on what I do. That’s the great fun and excitement of being in public life, that you’re meeting people every day. Through the Boston Global Forum, meeting people, in many cases, I’ve never met before who will be participating with us actively and making my life richer and I hope making the lives of millions of people.

Jonas Brunschwig: I guess we’re nearing our conclusion and we have a few more questions. You’ve recently turned eighty, a lot of time to acquire a fair amount of wisdom. Is there anything that you know today that you wish you had known?

Gov. Dukakis: Oh yeah. Probably the most important thing is that, if you’re going to have a real impact on the world, on your community, on your country, on the quality of life of people, you’ve got to be a consensus builder. That doesn’t mean that you can’t hold strong views on things. I do. I feel very strongly about a lot of these things. But, one of the lessons I learned, somewhat painfully, when I was defeated for public office was that if you’re in a position of political responsibility you can have an enormous influence in bringing people together, sitting folks down, turning yourself into a good listener. I was not a very good listener when I started. I was a pretty good talker but not a good listener. By virtue of the position you hold you can bring people together and work with them to try to achieve consensus, which is basically what we’re doing here with the Boston Global Forum in our first year. Seeing if we can develop international consensus around this issue of occupational safety and health. I would have liked to have been able to do that better back when I was in my twenties and it took me about twenty years to figure it out. These days I think I’m a much better consensus builder and what one finds is that you can accomplish a great deal if you can bring people together, reason together, and come to some agreement. We’re seeing that now on the international stage.

Jonas Brunschwig: Well, it looks like we’re running out of time. We still have several questions, if you’re willing to go forward a little bit.

Gov. Dukakis: If we have the time, we’ll do it.

Tuan Nguyen: I think we will post online and Mike can continue to write or something like that because one hour is up.

Gov. Dukakis: We’ve got a meeting of our planning group and that’s important so that we can chart our future. But if you have questions, just shoot them to us online and I’ll do the best I can to respond. I hope that as we wrap up this session that we can involve more and more and more of you in the work of the Boston Global Forum, invite your active participation, and your ideas and your suggestions and really come up with a strong set of recommendations for dealing with this particular question of decent, basic occupational health and safety standards in the workplace all over the world. Thanks for being part of this and we look forward to working with you in the future.

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UPCOMING: Announcement of Framework for Peace @Dec 12

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September 17 Conference: Speakers and Delegates – Biographies

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Transcription: Interview with Sedex’s Mark Robertson

Transcription February 19th: Best Practice Companies on Worker Rights and Safety

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BGF’s First Distinguished Lecture With Chairman Michael Dukakis

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