 Good afternoon from what I assume is a snowy virtual Davos and good morning from Washington, DC My name is Ishaan Therur I'm a foreign affairs columnist here at the Washington Post and it's a real privilege to be your moderator today accompanied by a distinguished panel of global leaders for a session where we will be honing in on social justice in the recovery Something that cuts at the heart of this week's agenda and Davos the idea of a great global reset As we reckon with the consequences and the aftermath of the pandemic We've all experienced this past year as a series of compounding crises a once-in-a-century global health crisis provoked both unforeseen economic contractions But also revealed deep systemic inequities in societies everywhere from countries that we classify as low-income to ones where well to the wealthiest country in the world the pandemic among other things Exposed gaps in social safety nets failures in global governance and fiscal policy and of course the need for greater racial justice So how do we work through these challenges? And how do we ensure that the recovery does not just simply take us back to the status quo ante? To do to talk through this. I'm delighted to be joined by a panel of global leaders on the front lines of this struggle and you know with the real solutions for these questions I'm joined by Gabriela Boucher executive director of OXFIM International Saade Khan the mayor of London Anisa Kamadoli Costa Chairman and president of the Tiffany and Co foundation as well as the chief sustainability officer at Tiffany and Co and Darren Walker president of the Ford Foundation one of the preeminent and global philanthropic organizations Gabriela, let's start with you Every year OXFIM comes to Davos with a report on global inequality You you guys act something like a kind of town crier among the global elites It's the report is always rather grim reading but this year in particular because of the pandemic It has some pretty stark revelations. I was wondering if you could set the stage for us On your on OXFIM's findings and what that what the implications are for a recovery thereafter Thanks Isham I would like really to talk about how equality has to be at the heart of social justice and this year we've presented the report the inequality virus and Many of us when we think about inequality We think this is something just for idealists or an inconvenience to the serious business of capitalism But OXFIM's message is no actually Equality is a fresh and moral and serious framework that can reshape the way we run our economies for the 21st century Equality in our economy will drive us towards achieving the global goals that governments around the world agree to and It's crucial to fighting the climate breakdown And let me say we're paying for the profound failure of governments to address inequality OXFIM is at Davos as you say this year with new data it shows that we risk facing the greatest rise in inequality since records began and It could take more than a decade for billions of people to recover from the economic hit of the pandemic While at the very top just 10 billionaires all men have seen their wealth skyrocket by half a trillion dollars since March That could have paid to vaccinate the world and prevent anyone from being pushed into poverty by the pandemic We also show the deadly impact of systemic racism and patriarchy Nearly 22,000 black and Hispanic people in the US would still be alive today If their COVID-19 mortality rates were the same as white people 22,000 people So you ask for solution Ishan and we'll get there shortly won't be but let me say that first that tinkering at the edges won't do We need to end extreme inequality and abolish gender and racial inequality at the very core of our economic strategy Merikan I'd like to bring you in now. You are of course in charge of one of the world's most important cities across roads of Humanity an engine of business in Europe and the West What have you seen? Over the course of the pandemic What have you seen in terms of the inequities exposed within your city and How are you hoping to redress those inequities going forward? Will it shine it's lovely to join you and can I just say I fully agree with almost every word Gabriella said and I'm looking forward to From an ESA and Darren shortly. I'm the mayor In my view of the greatest city in the world. We are a global city and we think our diversity is a strength We don't simply tolerate difference. We respect it. We embrace it and we celebrate it One of the things that that Gabriella talked about which is really important is what this pandemic has done is not simply expose The structural inequalities in our society, I would argue we are the most progressive city in the world Even being so this pandemic has exposed those structural inequalities, but it's exacerbate them as well What do I mean by that? If you're a black male Londoner You're four times more likely to have lost your life than if you're a white male Londoner if you're a mother You're 50% more likely to have lost your job than if you're a father and so I've Experienced what the IMF is talking about when the IMF says if we're not careful we could undo 30 years of progress made around gender equality and It's shine your hair at phrases like build back better been used by not just the new president of the USA I can actually smile when I say president of the USA now rather than frown or Or be or be intimidated into cowering but actually it means a new normal a new normal where we have a just recovery And I hate using the word opportunity when it comes to a global pandemic, but Gabriella is spot on We've got to use this horrible pandemic as an opportunity to reset and in your words reboot Our economies across the globe and that means not just government But also civic society and the business community the faith community and others working together To address some of the inequalities we talked about for too many years on an annual basis at Davos Well to turn to the business community Anisa Tiffany's of course is a major international brand Company with supply chains arcing around the world What has the pandemic taught you over the past year and revealed to you about the nature of your business and since you are tasked with sustainability How are you hoping to adapt? Both the functioning of Tiffany and how do you hope the private sector can change or adapt going forward? No, thank you Eishon. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here today along with my fellow panelists Look, we all know that we're living in an extremely interconnected and interdependent world And we can't afford to think or to work in silos and as a business community It's critical for us to address issues such as climate equity and social and environmental justice in a collaborative and Integrated manner, so it's not just about reducing your greenhouse gas emissions or working on the diversity of your workforce Of course, these actions are critical But businesses must think more broadly and at the same time more deeply and they have to constantly be connecting the dots between all of these Areas and the intersectionality of these views is really what's important So I think that there are three things very briefly that will be crucial for the business community to be doing to contribute to a Just recovery the first is listening to different voices and giving them a seat at the table So it's critical to bring in those different voices external voices to better inform what businesses do and how we should work So that we go beyond business as usual And truly listening to the perspective of communities whether local or global is going to make business stronger and enable greater positive impact And you know, this is something at Tiffany that we've long done communicating and really deeply engaging with indigenous peoples and community organizations and NGOs But this same principle applies internally as well, right? We're living in an era of employee activism where businesses that are going to be successful in the long term We'll be listening to and learning from employees across the organization regardless of level regardless of title or geography The second is that business should champion and advance what I would consider true Multi-stakeholder efforts. I've long believed in the importance of multi-stakeholder efforts and to be clear when I say that this means that an Initiative takes all stakeholders into account from the beginning and gives them a voice as well as a seat at the table And true multi-stakeholder initiatives are not about just consultation, right? And frankly, we see a lot of the just consultation, but they're about co-creation And so that's why as a purchaser of And a consumer of mind materials We've been championing an effort that that maybe I can talk about later called the initiative for responsible mining assurance but in short it is an Entity that has NGOs labor unions affected communities Mining companies and then downstream businesses such as Tiffany with an equal seat at the table when it comes to governance And what that does is it leads to a stronger standards that all stakeholders have out of voice it and are represented by and traditional standards You know traditionally I've just consulted with stakeholders, but it doesn't necessarily mean that their views are incorporated So maybe we'll have time later to get to that But my I want to make sure that that I just highlight my third and final point which is that businesses are speaking out But it's critical that they're backing up their words with action So in my time at Tiffany We've long used the power of our voice and brand to speak out on issues ranging from responsible mining to climate change To human rights and what we've seen over this past year is that this must be the norm for business not the exception But most importantly it is not simply about speaking out It cannot be greenwashing or performative allyship You cannot put something up on an Instagram page without having the appropriate underlying work Be in place and what's important and what everyone is looking for and I'm glad and I hopefully people will be held to account It's for authenticity and that includes not only what actions businesses are and have been doing But taking and also looking at what new and increased actions. They're going to be taking looking forward This issue of the private sector the private sector speaking out Darren if I can turn to you, you know here in the US Our experience of the pandemic was so punctuated in the summer by the explosion of protests Following the killing of George Floyd I was wondering if you could perhaps venture into what the impact to those protests were in the context of the pandemic We had a public health and and social crisis compounded by The deep historical wound being resurfaced in America and is it important when we think of a just recovery To to think of these things together Thank you each on and it's a great honor for me to be with you my friends Anisa and Gabriella and of course the great mayor. What an honor for me to be here before Jumping into the challenge of what happens in a post George Floyd world a world for corporations where we are being held to account I want to just make sure we remember who the audience at Davos is The audience at Davos are the world's greatest capitalist Now I am a capitalist because I believe that capitalism is the best way To organize an economy But I also have a point of view that if capitalism is to be sustained We must intentionally Put a nail in the coffin of the ideology of the last 50 years Propagated first and foremost by Milton Friedman and others who used the Friedman ideology as scaffolding To allow the kind of and propel the kind of inequality that Gabriella has spoken about this morning So we must put the nail in the coffin first Secondly, we must recognize that the challenge of White supremacy as difficult as it is to talk about it is real Patriarchy is real in our capitalist systems and if we want a more just recovery We have to acknowledge that there was a in my view. I organize things sort of in time and space and there was a BC world Before coronavirus there was a world that world is over Doesn't mean that we've lost everything in that world It just means that many of the norms and structures and understandings of that world in a post Coronavirus world in a PC world must be reorganized reimagined and dismantled And so the issue of white supremacy of patriarchy must be acknowledged in the boardroom As part of the diagnosis of recovery because without acknowledging it We will engage in the kinds of things that Anisa was just speaking of the performative acts So which we saw some Academy Award winning quality performances by leaders of corporations Who are not following through and so we now have to ask ourselves How do we move beyond the statements of black lives matter? to Looking at the boardroom and asking ourselves. How can it be? That one third of the S&P 500 does not even have one African American on its board How would a company With that composition of a board be able to authentically implement Execute on and sustain diversity as a value So we have work to do we capitalist if we believe in capitalism and if we believe in justice These are not irreconcilable ideas And stakeholder capitalism of course is the watchword Of this week or the watch phrase of this week here in Davos Down if I could stick with you could you talk a bit more perhaps as we knuckle down into some of the solutions that we're Mentoring in the months ahead Can you talk a bit more about Some arenas of progress that you've seen or that you hope to help affect Going forward in the United States whether it's with ways in which public sector the private sector can lobby or be more effective or ways in which Certain political leaders can take more proactive action alongside civil society I am sure the Ford Foundation is at the heart of so many of these conversations We're very lucky to be investing in a major initiative on the future of workers Because for us, it's not about the future of work. It is about the future of workers and will they have Security will they have a safety net so the policies that support workers We need more policies like paid six days like the ways in which Companies are a match of reimagining ownership. What happened to those? Employees stock ownership Corporations they went away well, they went away because of an ideology that all of the profits of a company belong to the Shareholders not employees so we have a system where employees no longer are owners of their company So we need to restructure our economy to have more Mechanisms for employee ownership. It's something we're supporting. We're also looking at the fundamental issue of investments, how do we invest our endowment at the Ford Foundation because Investors asset managers have power in the marketplace. So we have to use the marketplace We have to also ask some fundamental questions about the allocation of capital and labor and How do we and how have we come to a? circumstance of a race to the bottom to pay people as little as we can and And nearer to the benefit of people like me people who have assets people who are able to invest in the market and for whom My privilege is compounded why while the disadvantage of Frontline workers essential workers their disadvantage is compounded in our system So we have to at the corporate board level CEOs and boards have to ask some fundamental questions and not just assume That every dollar That is available has to always be allocated to repurchase shares Let's have some fundamental questions about what is the right allocation of Share repurchases versus capital expenditures and operating expenditures in our capital structures as corporate entities So these are fundamental things that happen actually behind the curtain And it's time for us to bring some transparency to those decisions And it will happen when you put more diverse people at the board table when you put representatives of workers at the board table And these are those conversations that are happening at a company like Tiffany and what the stakeholder capitalism look like there Yes, I mean, you know Years ago companies used to follow legislation But of course laws are uneven globally And so what you've seen over the past number of years are companies sort of leading by creating their own standards, right? And I think that that is good when they are leading standards But again to to Darren's point to points I made earlier and that Gabriella and the mayor made earlier You need to make sure that you're having an inclusive conversation and that means from the top down So as Darren said from a governance the board down and from the bottom up and from an external perspective, right? So you need to make sure that you're you're including and listening to an Inclusive set of voices as a business since now business has had to Create and set higher bar standards as we move forward American, I have two questions for you if I may Of course, you've experienced the pandemic in London In a rather fraught political moment as well as Brexit was carried out Could you talk a bit about first what the experience of Going through brexit was in the middle of this global health crisis Yeah, of course I can or first of all just follow one of the points that Darren made which is We mustn't assume that the horrific killing of George Floyd Only had an impact on minister to Minneapolis the USA the ripples of the horrific killing that I felt around the world And one of the things Darren we've we've needed to do This summer is to not just be You know activists in the sense of the black lives matter movement but allies of this issue because it is a fact Whether you're in America London or elsewhere across the globe if you are black Your life chances are far less than you are at any other ethnicity Racism inequality and discrimination suffered by black people in 2021 in the most progressive in the world is still unacceptable And that acknowledgement that Darren talked about has been taken a put has been taking place across the business community civic society politics And the rest and so if you imagine ishile we're dealing with in a bandwidth this awful pandemic We've got the fact that the pandemic is exposing and exacerbating structural inequalities You've got the black lives matter movement, which is really important exposing race and equality and discrimination against black people And then you have Self-inflicted trauma caused by Brexit and so you can understand why my government Didn't quite do the deal with the EU. That was the best deal possible I'm somebody of course didn't want to leave the European Union. We are we are in my view We need to be multilateralists. We need to be working together We need to be pulling our resources that I'm afraid ishile the timing of Brexit could have been worse We have left the European Union So my job as mayor of this great city is to make sure that I continue to amplify The underlying strengths our city has which aren't going to change where we are on the timeline geography the language a unique ecosystem our diversity the financial sector the Universities the life sciences the tech creative industries and so forth But it's going to be a challenge ishile and that's why when we began the conversation We talked about a new normal Rebooting and I think there are opportunities here and one of the great things about the conversations I'm hearing from friends in the business community like Darren and Anissa But also civic society like Gabriella are the conversations we're having in London. I brought together in London Key players from business community government Faith community civil society to work together on what should be our missions going forward and colleagues can go to any search engine Typing the London Recovery Board and look at the nine missions We've chosen which touch upon the things that Gabriella Darren and Anissa have talked about. I'll give you one example ish on the digital inequality This conference is taking place virtually, but in our respective cities think about those members of our society Who haven't got the right connectivity? Haven't got the right devices haven't got the right skill set and the same goes for not just meeting each other But jobs for the future skills for the future and we've got to have the humility as politicians to accept we have all the solutions and We're seeing in London the business community also with humility saying that civic society saying that The faith community saying that but us pooling our resources. I love the way you need to describe it We've got to be getting them involved in the design phase in the implementation phase in the execution phase And we're doing that and we've hot-wired our DNA ish on to make sure we're fully utilising the full talent pool that exists across our city Just to stick with that for one for one more question to you the past half decade we've seen a certain a certain kind of ascendant nationalism in the West But the experience the pandemic and of course the the fundamental reality of the climate threat facing the planet and indeed also the question of Social and economic inequities around the world do not have national only national solutions What what role do cities and especially cities of the scale like London and the importance of London? What role do cities have? as engines of Finding these solutions and driving change Well, our world is becoming more urbanised more and more people are moving to live in cities And one of the things that I'm a big subscriber to is is something said by a former American mayor Which is if the 19th century was renowned for a century of empires The 20th century has a century for nation-states the 21st century is going to be about cities and mayors That's where the action is. I'll give you one example ish on outside our direct control But if you look at who has been standing up to the rise of nativist populist movements around the globe Not just from the United States of America 2016 onwards up until recently, but Hungary Poland Brazil Philippines Italy some parts of France in the UK It's been the peoples and leaders of cities Standing up to the rise of netted populist movements and our job is to address the legitimate affairs people have in our cities and In urban parts of our countries as well and the best antidote in recent times has been the election of President Joe Biden in America How it's possible to address people's fears how it's possible to take up Those who are subscribers and advocates of nativist populist movements and win if I say so ish on the way the US constitutions Withstood the challenges is something that many of us looking all right. And that's one of the reasons why you are a beacon to other parts of the world Yeah, I'd love to bring you in now. You've heard some of the the discussion here about solutions to some of these very thorny questions of inequity that have been exacerbated by the pandemic Is there any obvious sort of, you know Blindingly necessary solution that governments can take specifically going forward feeling In this panel everybody I feel is listening to each other and it's and and reflecting on each other and it's the what each of of our panellists have been talking about is the interconnectedness and the really appreciation of diversity means listening to each other in this deep way and I think Anisa also spoke of co-creation and I believe this the the way in which we do this transformation is as important as the as the end itself and we need to Sort of end this polarization and and be much more conscious of our interconnectedness and I believe that's how we start building and and recovering differently. I think one thing that is definitely very pressing precisely in this interconnectedness is the issue of vaccines. So it's a critical inequality issue at this moment. So Rich countries are currently, you know, making their greatest efforts to to get their populations vaccinated as soon as possible. But we know there's an issue of Availability of vaccines and basically the majority of the world is being left out. So one in nine people in developing countries is likely to miss out on a vaccine. And that's a recipe for inequality and really self defeating for the recovery. So we are not alone in one country or another. It needs everybody to to work together and we really need to have governments ensure that there is no monopoly on a COVID-19 vaccine. That's very important. And then at this moment also how do we also make sure that this right to health that we've all said is is denied because of issues of racism and sexism in many countries. How do we ensure that people get care irrespective of the color of their skin or the cash in their purse and that we really achieve universal health care like middle income Costa Rica pulled it off in a decade. So and also how do we actually fund this fairer future that we're all talking about. So for this we need to think of taxing differently. And this in this area Argentina is leading the way with a one off wealth tax to fund the COVID recovery. But we think this would be now the norm. So we can't think of a small adjustment. We really need to see how we're going to fund a fair and just recovery. That is really redistributing at the same time as as it enables all all participants of the economy to be active. And as Darren was saying we need action to ensure workers rights and also that unions have a seat at the table and that business is therefore benefit from these different perspectives. And and we had the example last week from Unilever that we partner with how they've just backed a living wage for for everybody across the supply chain. And that's that's really huge. And I think the quote from the Unilever CEO saying without healthy societies there is no healthy business tells us how we are. You know we can't think of one without the other. And this is the type of action that we need everybody to take on. And following the movement of Black Lives Matters or new nomenos and see how we can bring anti racist and gender equality into the core of what we do into our new 21st century economy. Gabriella that's perfect. I think you really put a lot down on the table. Thank you so much for joining this terrific panel. And this is just a very, very important conversation as we move ahead. Thank you again.