Chairperson, distinguished panellists, ladies and gentlemen

Thanks to all of you, this Forum has been an extraordinary event. In more than 60 sessions over three days, we’ve heard from experts and practitioners approaching the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights from every angle: from tracking working conditions in supply chains to making the link with the Sustainable Development Goals to developing a binding treaty.

Since this year’s theme is tracking progress and ensuring coherence, I want to tell a story that illustrates the potential of these two concepts for the future of our field.

In 1987, the aluminium company Alcoa appointed a new CEO. At his first shareholders’ meeting, the new leader, Paul O’Neill, didn’t announce that he would restructure the company, or carry out layoffs, or sell off its most profitable units. He announced that from now on, Alcoa would become the safest company in the world to work for. Accidents, not profits, would be the focus of his efforts.

Almost immediately, O’Neill instituted a policy where all company executives had to attend the funeral of any worker killed on the job. In the first few weeks of his tenure, a worker was killed in Mexico, and O’Neill instructed his executives to fly away from whatever meetings they were attending, no matter where they were in the world, to come to rural Mexico and attend the funeral.

He told every executive, even the ones in charge of things like accounting and human resources, to visit the plant where the worker was killed. It was their job, he said, to find out what had gone wrong and to consider how they could prevent similar accidents in the future.

Suddenly, safety became the concern of everyone in the company. Vice presidents gave workers the mandate to fix any unsafe conditions they saw immediately, even if it meant skipping the formal request and budget approval processes. When a worker called O’Neill at home at 2 am to report a broken conveyor belt, O’Neill told the factory manager to be there to fix it by 5 am. Every accident at every plant was seen as a company-wide failure.

In O’Neill’s 13 years as CEO, Alcoa’s accident rate fell to near-zero. Managers found that many of the safety fixes reported by workers actually made the plants more efficient. Profits rose by 400 percent.

I want to be clear: I’m not telling this story to imply that everything a company does to respect human rights will boost profits. Some of them will, and some of them won’t. We should continue to stress the moral and legal duties of companies, as well as the business benefits when they exist.

What I think this story illustrates most, though, is the immense power of measurement, and the ability of companies, when they have the will, to relentlessly improve. Before O’Neill’s tenure, his managers saw accidents as an inevitable part of doing business. Before the early 1900s, companies said child labour in their supply chains was inevitable. Before the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, companies said paying bribes in developing countries was inevitable. And yet, when the incentives changed, either inside the companies or outside of them, the companies changed too...

And finally, I want to make one general consideration that all of us, no matter which pillar we’re working on, should keep in mind:

Effectively implementing the Guiding Principles means measuring and tracking where we’re making progress and where we’re falling behind. We need comprehensive data on how businesses are impacting human rights, as well as robust systems for tracking state and company approaches to address those impacts.

The CEO of Alcoa didn’t make his deputies care about health and safety by asking them to. He provided them with the numbers, rewarded them for improving performance and punished them for degrading it...