Monem Salam: 
Welcome to Halal Money Matters presented by Saturna Capital. I'm Monem Salam. And one of the most common questions I get when I go to mosques or even conferences is Muslims that are working for companies, they ask me, know, my 401(k) lineup doesn't have a single Islamic option. So what can I actually do about it? So what I decided to do was actually have a two-part series interviewing what others have done in the situation. One took the route of engagement with senior management and the other one actually ended up filing a lawsuit. So today what we're going to do is the first part. I'm joined by Malek Sarhan, who is a Palestinian-American engineer who started his career at General Motors and right in the middle of COVID and quickly realized that none of the 27 funds in his 401(k) were truly Sharia-compliant. Instead of just opting out and leaving that 4% match on the table, what Malek decided to do, through GM's MENA employee resource group, which is Middle East, North Africa, and what also with the help of a senior executive, they helped make the case for adding access to halal funds through the plan’s brokerage window. What we're going to do is talk to him exactly about what he did, what worked inside this huge organization like GM and maybe with that you'll find some insights and nuggets to be able to follow a similar path at your own company, Inshallah. Let's get started.

As-salamu alaykum, Malek, thank you for joining us.

Malek Sarhan: 
Wa-alaykum s-salam, thanks for having me on.

Monem Salam: 
Yeah, look, this is one of those shows that I've wanted to do for a long time. You know, there's a lot of people who come up to me and in our team and are like, you know, I want to I'm working for a company. I have a 401(k). There are no real Islamic options for me. What do I do? How do I get them to be able to do that? And we were having a conversation two weeks ago and you mentioned that, you know, when you were at General Motors, you actually helped them to get that option available. And I was like, I got to get you on the show. Right away. was like, Malek, we got to set up a timer now. So really glad you could join us. And I think you have a disclaimer you wanted to make as well.

Malek Sarhan: 
Yes, absolutely. So yeah, I'm more than happy to share kind of the experiences that I went through to bring on the Sharia compliant option for the retirement. But I just wanted to, the disclaimer I wanted to say is essentially that I'm going to kind of share the experiences I had as an employee kind of going through the motions. I don't represent General Motors as an entity at all. So I'm more than happy to kind of share the process and everything that we went through for that, but I don't represent the company. So it's just my perspective.

Monem Salam: 
Yeah, and I think, no, that's a really good point because I think a lot of this stuff we'll talk about can be applied everywhere else also. So I hope people can benefit from it. But I wanted to start off and maybe just get a background from you, right? Where you come from as far as what city and stuff like that, how you got to GM and then what are you doing now?

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, essentially I'm Palestinian-American. My parents moved from Palestine in the 80s to the Chicago area. So I grew up there in the Bridgeview community, which is a very Palestinian-American community. I was put through Islamic school, pretty much middle school and high school. So from a very young age, my parents had always instilled this Islamic values at the core of everything. So after I graduated from Universal, I went to Illinois Tech, which is an engineering school in the South Side of Chicago, majored in mechanical engineering and then got really interested in the automotive industry. So I worked at a couple of car companies. I spent some time at Toyota and then Rivian. And then finally I was at GM for about four years.

Monem Salam: 
Did you, just had a curiosity, are you a lover of cars and that's why you got into it?

Malek Sarhan: 
I'm actually not much of a gear head. I like cars, but I was more obsessed with the scale of the automotive industry. I did an internship at Toyota where we were doing, I was in their manufacturing plant for their Corolla model. And the Corolla is like one of the highest volume products in the world. So just to see like, know, implement a change on the product and then we'd see, you know. 100, 300, 400 vehicles kind of rolling off the line every day. To me that was like fantastic and you could point to something on the road and say you did that. yeah, it was something I derived a lot of fulfillment from, ended up working at General Motors in Detroit. So right after college I moved to Detroit and I lived there for about four and a half years in various roles, mostly in like electric vehicle development. So things like charging and batteries. But in Michigan I got a really nice flavor of the Muslim community. Things like Maftah Institute, my local mosques, just kind of complementing the work life with the Islamic foundation, alhamdulillah. And then I actually left General Motors about a year ago, year and a half ago, to right now I'm pursuing my MBA at Harvard Business School. So I'm not at the company anymore, but still very connected with the folks that are there and very invested in the company's mission. yeah.

Monem Salam: 
That's great. Good luck on that MBA. So let's get started. we're talking about the 401(k) . And let's kind of set the scene, right? You come into GM, and what happens? On your first day, was the first day that you discovered what was going on? Or did take you some time to come to that realization? What was going through your mind?

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, I remember my first day at GM, it was like July of 2020. So was like, this was COVID time. So I had orientation remotely. And so I remember it was like a three day thing where like, you know, one day was essentially focused on benefits. One day was focused on like, how do you, where do get your badge and where do you like check in, where do you go? And the second day was just all benefits. So we talked extensively about like health benefits and we talked a lot about retirement at length. And so what happened was like, we were essentially showed as employees. And I came in through like this entry level engineering program. So I was in this orientation with about 200 other people, most of which were non-Muslim. There were a couple of Muslims and we slowly found each other. you know, when they went through this benefits presentation, they essentially outlined that like our brokerage partner was Fidelity and that these were the options that we could have for opting in for, you know, 401(k)  options with, within Fidelity. like, you know, went through things like our 401k, the Roth options, pre-tax, post-tax. And it was a lot to kind of digest in one day. But the one thing that was like principle on the top of my mind, this is remember like a new grad out of college, like I was 21. I never really thought much about a 401(k). So it's kind of like a, it's kind of like a familiar experience for a lot of folks that are like entered their first job in the corporate environment. And the first thing that I was saying was like, okay, well, I just want to make sure that whatever I end up opting into is halal because you know, my salary is something that I tried to choose a company that I thought was not engaging in income that would be like impermissible for myself and my values as a Muslim. But when it came to stocks and it came to retirement options, there was this big kind of gray area. And I think a lot of people have that kind of anxiety. I certainly did. So yeah, they essentially presented a list of options of things that we could essentially, the way that it worked was you would opt into investing your retirement portfolio into certain funds. So there was like, you know, could put in 4 % or 4 at least 4 % or north of that for of your income into your retirement options and then they would do a 4 % matching. And then from there it was just, you know, you get to choose where you, where you go.

Monem Salam: 
So let me stop here. that was the first time you had exposure to it. I did a previous podcast where we talked about what do you do on your first day when you come to work and that type of thing. But did you ever have it, did you ever think about it from a perspective of before you actually took the job, you would look into the benefits and see whether something, like your 401(k) was halal. Because that is something that I've talked to people about as well. Before you ever accept, even if they don't have it, at least it raises an awareness that hey, there are people out there that are looking for Halal options and they might or might not take a job based on whether or not the 401(k) options are there. So was that something on your mind whenever you were initially applying?

Malek Sarhan: 
It's a great question and honestly I would say that like, you know, it was a part of the calculus of like where I wanted to work after school was, you know, making sure there was some halal income. But to be candid with you, I mean, it was COVID time, this was like March of 2020. And so for me, it was more so like... I was really happy that I had a job offer out of school because a lot of people were getting offers rescinded. And so for me, I was like, okay, I'm not working in like some defense capacity or something that I'm not comfortable with. This is a car manufacturer. I know that there are a decent amount of Muslims that work there. I'm sure I can figure it out. I don't know all the details. didn't know at that time, of course, I didn't know about the lack of retirement options, but I said, this is something that potentially I can deal with there. And now I had to kind of face the challenge of dealing with that when I got there. Right. So, yeah.

Monem Salam: 
Right. Cool. So then on day one, did you actually raise an objection or did that come later on?

Malek Sarhan: 
Well, the first thing I did was I actually, wasn't sure what would count as Sharia compliant and what wouldn't. Like I saw like, for example, they had like the S&P 500 and they had like a social index. And so the first thing I did was I just kind of went online and tried to talk, you know, look up your, your standard resources of like, would consider, what would be considered Sharia compliant? Like what would be Sharia compliant if you don't have like a fully Sharia compliant option, what's your next best option? And so from that, I won't go into the details of the research, but like from the research, what I gathered was there was not a single purely Sharia compliant option. There wasn't a single one out of 27. I remember it was 27 options, not one was a good option. It was all like, well, in this case, maybe the S&P, maybe the social index, because that's kind of close, but you know, nothing was truly there. So that's when I think it was like second week of work. I had ended up reaching out to the HR person. Go ahead, sorry.

Monem Salam: 
You know, I was going to say that's a really good point because a lot of times there will be like a social fund or environmental fund and that type of thing. And I tell people it's like that's great for all the like, even if it's an ethical fund, will avoid the alcohol and the tobacco, but it won't do is avoid the banks. And that's a fairly large part of both of the S&P, but also on the ESG or the ethical fund side of it. Yeah, it might be maybe another option. But it's definitely not the option for us, right?

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, it was like a 50% solution if you want to call it that. And yeah, that was exactly, that was the point was a lot of the financial institutions within those funds were not compliant. So brought up, I raised the alarm. I think it was like my second week of work. And this is something, it takes a little bit of guts. mean, you just started this job and you're very happy to have the job because of the economic environment. And so, but you know, I think it was an environment where I felt kind of comfortable to just ask for, you know, just to at least explore. Maybe there was something that I wasn't aware of. So I had, I had reached out to the individual that hosted our benefits training on the second day of orientation. And I had said, you know, I wanted to clarify, I see the 27 options. I happen to be Muslim and I have some strict requirements on what I can invest in in terms of my 401(k). is there an option to like self-select a fund or is there an option to go beyond the 27, for example? And the answer was like a pretty firm no, that the 27 was seen collectively as a very well-rounded reputable kind of like, high return proven portfolio that like the finance team and the benefits team had kind of curated for their employees. And the answer I got was that like, you know, GM is a company of over 60,000 employees. It's a huge global entity and it would be really difficult to accommodate like every individual who wanted to bring on a fund. I mean, that's kind of ridiculous if you think about it. So that was kind of, for me, it was like, okay, this is just not happening. I'd spoken to some of my colleagues that were most about the company, what they were doing. The majority of them a lot of them actually opted not to even invest in their own 401(k) they didn't they essentially missed out on the employee matching which I thought was a huge loss because that's free money it's you know this is the first thing you should be doing if you're you know you're single and you're young you're coming out of school you know safety net 401(k) like that's absolutely we need to start on.

Monem Salam: 
That's true. And that's a really good point. What I did want to mention is just so we can lay the background, kind of the people who decide, you know, what are going to be the elections in the actual 401(k) as far as funds are concerned, they're made up of employees of GM, right? And they use a consultant sometimes, and I don't know what General Motors uses, but they do use a consultant sometimes to be able to help them craft it. But it is something that they're trying their best to be able to do and they work with HR to be able to do that. And it's really important to kind of mention that it's very, probably would be fairly easy for you to be able to contact these people because they are doing it as kind of like a volunteer thing for the company for the benefit of all the employees. So that's one thing. The second thing I was going to mention is you're absolutely right. I do come across many people and may Allah reward them for doing it. They actually don't invest any of their money in the 401(k) because they don't have any Islamic options and then they lose out on the 4 % match, the growth every year, those type of things. That's become an issue as well. So anyway, I just want to highlight that that you had mentioned because I see that across different companies also.

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah. No, that's a great point. And honestly, yeah. And I don't, and I respect that opinion. I think it's like, if there's any gray, they kind of want to shy away. I think like what's important and what I, from the scholars that I had talked to that were in Michigan at the time, they were saying like, it's important from a, from a, like, from a religious standpoint that we establish, like, what is the line? What is permissible? What isn't permissible? So that like, if you're at the situation where you don't have a perfect option, but these are the options, what exactly is kind of like the ruling? And so in that, in that instance, I felt comfortable taking, you know, kind of like a shortcut, but, or not a shortcut, but like a 50 % solution. But to your original point about the decision makers, that's a very, that was, mean, once we get into the story of how this ended up working out, that was a crucial point. And I don't have full transparency on every single lever of the decision making process, but I do know that the ultimate decision makers rested within the internal organization. They rested within GM. They did have an external partner for the brokerage. Of course it was Fidelity that was there. That was their choice. But like it was a difficult decision for the people that had to decide because they're balancing the relationship with Fidelity, the investment portfolio folks, and then of course the employees. So there's a lot of stakeholders.

Monem Salam: 
Yeah. Okay, so let's not jump ahead, but this is going to be an important point later on. So now, okay, your second week, you start raising a little bit of, you talk to other Muslim employees, they're not investing at all. What's step number two?

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, so just from the understanding from my coworkers and colleagues and friends that like they weren't investing in the 401k, it definitely starts to kind of create an environment of discontentment where you're like, wow, like this is something that I feel like it's a job benefit. It's something that I'm owed as an employee, you know, to get 4% matching is fairly good. And I felt, I started to kind of feel a little bit disappointed really, truly that this wasn't an option that we had. So again, in terms of like how I had, like, raised the alarm at this point. I'd only done one thing. I had reached out to HR, the people that I had, that I had, gotten the orientation from at this point. So I'd say like in the first month or two months of work, when I had, you know, realized that there wasn't, this wasn't going to be an easy problem to fix. Another kind of element that came into this was, you know, these, these large organizations will have some, like employee affiliation groups like MENA, like, a veteran's affiliation group. And so these are like, kind of all under the umbrella of DE&I. But MENA, which is Middle East and North Africa, was a de facto group that a lot of the Muslims kind of got the representation through because actually none of these affiliation groups were allowed to be religious. So at least that was just General Motors policy. So there were no religious affiliation groups. We didn't have like a Muslim network at GM. But a lot of the times, yeah.

Monem Salam: 
So that's something that I think that is company specific because I do know of companies that do allow like a that they're called like Muslim employee resource group or they have different names from different corporations. I guess some I guess from the from I didn't I didn't realize this. I thought all of them had it. But I guess some of them have only like secular organizations and some companies allow religious ones as well. So if you're joining you or you kind of getting up there like kind of figure out like what is it that your company does allow? I guess that's that's the kind of the…

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, no great point. Yeah, so they didn't have any, whether it was because of a lack of the rules or because there just hadn't been any, from my understanding it was that the affiliation groups had to be, they didn't have to, they could not be affiliated with religion. They had to be like apolitical and areligious, think were the two requirements. So a lot of the like Muslim kind of concerns bubbled up through the MENA kind of ERG, we call it ERG, an employee resource group. And yeah.

Monem Salam: 
Was this through group chats and stuff like that? Is that how you were doing that?

Malek Sarhan: 
It's actually, yeah, so it is organized. Like these employee resource groups are actually like, they're kind of like entities within the company. So they'll have like someone who kind of oversees them, like an executive that's like a sponsor. They'll have like a whole board that's responsible that has a budget from the DE&I office usually. And a lot of these actually got slashed, you know, with the recent administration change because of the changing attitudes on DE&I. But, you know, they're organized entities within the company that just, they kind of work to create a better environment for the folks that affiliate with those groups. And so a lot of the, a lot of the Muslims happened to join the MENAgroup. when it came to like, for halal food on campus and like having a prayer space, a lot of those kind of represented themselves to leadership through the MENA ERG. Yeah. So I had engaged them and I said, is you guys are we doing anything about this? And the response from MENA was essentially, it's something that we've tried doing in the past, but there wasn't anyone that was actively kind of like owning that within the employee network. And so also kind of a dead end at that point.

Monem Salam: 
So at what point are you now, you like month or two into into GM now, or?

Malek Sarhan: 
When I started reaching out, was like two months, two or three within the company. It was very early. But the idea didn't have legs or any traction until much, much later, unfortunately. So, yeah.
Monem Salam: 
Okay. All right. So then, okay, let's go. Let's keep going. So, you know, you talk to the fellow Muslims, and they're like, yeah, we tried this before. And I've heard that a lot also. There are multiple iterations of people coming through and being able to do it. So nothing really happened. And then, so were you kind of like discouraged by that or kind of more encouraged to say, I'm going to get it done?

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, you know, I was, I was pretty discouraged. I'll be honest with you. was like, okay, well, you you're like one, one employee and you're kind of up against this kind of big behemoth of an organization. And, you know, like there's always whispers of like, you know, new hires that come in and they hack it. They kind of get, they get, reinvigorated and they're energized to kind of push this because every time we had a new wave of hires, you know, every July we would get a new wave of the recent grads from at least in the engineering organization. And we'd get a couple of Muslims that would come with every wave and they'd ask, okay, they'd look around and say, you know, what are you guys doing for your 401(k)s? And I'll kind of like sit them down and we'll have like the, this kind of like therapy discussion. I'll say, brother, like, let me explain to you what's, what's been going on. This is what I did. This is unfortunately like, what we're doing. So you have two options. You can either opt out or you can do this and accept that it's not a perfect solution, whatever your comfort level is. And that was kind of the cycle. it is something that was obviously like complimentary or tangential to my actual job roles. Of course, work got busy. I had to travel to some factories. And so it was naturally something that just was on the back burner, unfortunately, when you're not able to focus on it.

Monem Salam: 
Was there ever like attempted to able to tell HR or benefits can be like, hey, there's people losing out on that benefit because of that? Was there some kind of discussion on that?

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, occasionally there would be. like we would have in the first two years I was at GM, it was like I said, an entry level kind of engineering program where we would rotate. And the good thing is we would have kind of like constant check-ins with HR. And they would ask like how, you what's the, what's kind of the lay of the land? How are people doing? And I actually led the, I was president of like the entry level engineering program, was called TRAC. It was like a rotation program. I was president of that organization the second year that I was in it. And it's like a one year stint. And so I got a lot of interfacing with HR because I would meet with them weekly. And so this was something that would come up, because I mean, I had to represent a lot of these employees more than just myself, but the interests of the Muslim employees that were kind of concerned about not having an option, this would kind of bubble up every now and then. So sometimes we'd have in these check-ins, I'd say, you know, there's still this big concern about the 401(k) and the lack of an option for people that are Muslim. And the responses that I would generally get would be, we hear you, we want to validate that this is a concern for your community, and we want you to know that it's something that, you know, if we could kind of change immediately, we would or we would like to opt into it, but it's, there's a lot of different stakeholders and there's a lot of moving pieces. And that's not something that's really low lift. It's something that you'd need a lot of buy-in from the organization to do. And it's something that's just not on the roadmap right now. Which is like a nice way of saying, sorry, they're not going to happen right now. And so again, was disconcerting, I was overall, I was fairly content. Like I must say overall, I would say like the concerns in other aspects of the company were met pretty receptively, which is why I was even more surprised that this was kind of an issue that would persist. Because in other elements, like when it came to accommodations, like for Ramadan and for prayers while we're traveling, it was excellent, excellent, excellent kind of work environment, I would say least from my perspective. It helps that you're in Southeast Michigan, which is the second largest community of Muslims in the US.  Yeah, that's kind of, that's kind of, so I would say like that the timeline was like from when I joined in July of 2020 until probably year three was kind of the status quo where it was like occasionally I'd ask nothing would really happen and would just kind of roll with that. Unfortunately. Yeah.

Monem Salam: 
Okay, so then what was the spark that started everything kind of rolling?

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, the spark was so this, this employee resource group, this MENA group had like every year there was like new kind of elections and there was like a new, new, new individuals that were kind of going to represent the organization. And, um, I want to say it was like January of 2023 was when this kind of new batch of individuals had kind of come into the fold. And I had also kind of joined to lead like community, community events. And when that happened, uh, there was this reshuffling of resources within General Motors and a lot of these employee resources groups were actually kind of emboldened. They got more resources and they were actually given more of a frontline in terms of like marketing. They were represented a lot on like public facing marketing material because GM kind of saw that as like a positive thing. At least my perspective is GM saw this as a positive thing to like, you know, market to potential customers that like, we have, you know, the people behind your core vet are these, you know, Muslim and Arabs are like the people, you know, you have a lot of vets that are behind your Chevy Tahoe. So, so it was, it was a marketing tactic, but also it was just great for employees. So I want to say like early 2023, we not only got like a new team of individuals that were super kind of, passionate about pushing the mission of making MENA, you know, employees feel welcomed and home at GM, but we also got a new executive champion. And an executive, each one of these employee resource groups has got an executive champion. What it is is essentially you have one employee at the company who's at least, I think it's at least vice president, like vice president or higher. So someone who has some significant kind of decision making capacity at the company.

Monem Salam: 
Seniority level and stuff like that. It might be different at different companies, but it's somebody who's like overseeing it from the executive level. Right, I got it.

Malek Sarhan: 
Right. And they have, they have significant kind of people responsibility and they have some vested interests in the community that they're overseeing and they would kind of oversee that community. We had a new, we had a new executive champion who was, I won't list his name, but like he was the head of global Cadillac. So this guy was pretty, pretty, pretty up there, like just the head of a global brand. he had, he had managed the MENA region. So General Motors has offices in the Middle East, they're headquartered in Dubai. He had kind of, the reason why he was tapped to be the executive champion was because he he used to oversee that office a couple of years ago. And so he had kind of vested interest in the region. had like kind of the cultural know-how. He wasn't an individual with MENA background. He was like kind of like regular American who, but he was, he was very kind of invested in the community and he was excellent.

Monem Salam: 
So again, what's his name? Just in case I have a problem with my Cadillac, like I can call him up. Just kidding. Just kidding, just kidding.

Malek Sarhan: 
No, no, he's great. It was a great time. It was a great kind of transition moment because it felt like there was new life kind of breathed into the organization. And what happened was I was kind of on the leadership team for this employee resource group. And this was, I want to say this was May, May of 2023 at this point. And we had sat down with our executive champion and he was like, from a candid perspective, what exactly is it that, what are the, what are the, like the aspirational things that your organization would want in this organization, in GM, to really feel like real satisfaction and real like pride in where you work. And there were two things that were on the top of that, on the top of that list. The first one was MENA kind of demographic representation, which means when we, when you apply for a job or you want to move around with in the company. When you list your demographic, MENA people have to list as white because it's, you know, just so like being able to have another checkbox for like Middle East, North African, because right now it's all.

Monem Salam: 
It's like a classic poll everywhere you go. You're either Other or Asian Pacific Islander.

Malek Sarhan: 
Right. Exactly. So that was like, that was like a really high, that was like a really high item. I'd probably say it was number one. And number two was our Muslim employees have been banging on this door for probably 20 years about we need to have one Sharia compliant option, just one, because we have so many folks that are not interested in, that are not opting into any retirement options at GM. And when he heard that, I mean, I think it helps that this individual was also someone who was like passionate about personal finance. And he was like, you're telling me that I have individuals in my employee resource group that are missing out on the 4% match because we as a company failed to give them an option. And it was like a spark. Like for that, was like, okay, I'm gonna, we're gonna, you know, we'll essentially do what we can to see how this will happen. And that's when really the work started. So what I did being…

Monem Salam: 
That's awesome.

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, Alhamdulillah, it was amazing. What I'd done was I'd sat down with a couple of core groups, core individuals who are really passionate about this issue. And we put together like a one-pager. We were like, wanted to dumb this issue down for, you know, wherever it would go. Just essentially explaining what is Sharia compliance? What does it mean for funds to be like, it was literally just one page. It had to be extremely simple. And it was just like, what is the problem at hand? Why, what is, what is the current offering that the General Motors like retirement portal has? And why, what is the gap? Like where, where's the gap happening right now? It's like, okay, well, these are, this is where you are right now. This is where we need to be. This is where the gap is. And then we also give a recommendation. We said, these are five or six funds that are reputable. They have a legacy like Halal fund, like Amana. And we said, these are, choose any of these. Not only, not only are they good options, Fidelity offers them today. They're offered within Fidelity's portal today. And so a lot of these folks, they're, they're opting in for these funds in their personal Roth IRAs, for example, but they, they miss out on the matching. So that was literally just like put together a nice one pager, essentially explaining this concept to people that are not familiar with the background or even financially savvy and just dumbed it down really, really simple. And maybe dumb is the wrong word, but just explained it really, really clearly because at the end of the day, you're storytelling and you're communicating that the whole purpose of an employee resource group is to advocate for issues like this. And this is like a very clear kind of failure to meet the needs. So put the one pager together. That was kind of like the work that we did. The work that our executive champion at the time, head of Cadillac, he was able to get us into the room pretty much. That was like the big, that was like the big like, aha moment was that like, we were passionate about the issue. We were, we were able to effectively communicate the problem and very clearly kind of illustrate what the problems were, what the problem was at hand. But we didn't really have a place in the room with someone that was sitting next to us that had our community's kind of interests at hand. And so, you know, he had made this issue a personal issue. said, I'm to do whatever I can to make sure that this is something that you get in front of the right people to have to make this happen. And we'll ensure that it goes through in whatever way we can, we can, and if it doesn't, we're going to really understand why. We're going to need a great answer as to why this can happen.

Monem Salam: 
So basically he was kind of like, because he was senior enough to be able to open the door and let you meet with people that were actually making the decisions, right? That's kind of the idea.

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, and I think that was a good learning experience for me as like a young engineer of like the dynamic type of politics that happen at like big corporations is that you can kind of be empowered and you can be passionate about something. And the unfortunate reality is like the decision-making kind of lies within a small group of individuals. And that's just the nature of it. I think maybe you need to have a small group of decision-makers, but like you really need to tap at least one person in that group or whoever is in that decision making pool to really opt into making your issue a personal issue. And they really champion it. I mean, the executive champion, it's in the word. So that was really like the spark. then so I would like to say that that's what it all ended. But of course, you know, with any journey, there's hiccups, there's bumps. So that was May of 2023. So we got into the room and the people that were represented in this room where we had presented was it was essentially, so it was our executive champion. It was the folks that represented the employees, myself included. And then it was individuals from like the HR kind of employee benefits group. And they were the face of a lot of other folks that were kind of responsible for this decision. So not everybody was in the room. Like Fidelity wasn't in the room. We didn't have the people that were physically choosing the funds in the room. But it was more so like the front office of the HR benefits team was there. Well, it was not just them. It was their vice president because it was the equivalent of our VP. The decision in the room was that they said, we're going to make this happen. We're going to make it happen. We're going to try our best to offer with whatever way and in whatever way we'll be able to find a feasibility path. We really want to make sure that this is, if this is really like high kind of priority for you guys, we're going to try our best to at least have one option. And that was really like, it was amazing to hear that.

Monem Salam: 
Yeah, why do you think happened so quickly like that? Is it just because of the fact that you were sitting in the right room?

Malek Sarhan: 
I think it was like, it was the nature of the way that we presented the message. I think we had just excellent communication in terms of like what the problem was at hand and what needed to change versus us just kind of raising a flag. Like we had done the research and I think doing the research was important. And we also had the head of global Cadillac sitting to the left of me. And so naturally if he's gonna say like, you need to tell me why we can't do this if you're saying we can't do this because this is a big. This is a big priority for my community. I think that kind of double whammy was enough to kind of get us over the edge just to get buy-off. And so the decision was we're going to pursue this path. We're going to at least do the diligence to see what it would take. And, you know, we'll have an answer. At that time, they had said, our goal is that by, you know, benefits enrollment period, which is February of the new year of, or sorry, not enrollment is a, right before the new year, sorry, like Novemberish of 2023. So essentially ready for the 2024 benefits year, we would have a Sharia compliant option. That was the objective. So like maybe like a seven-ish months turnaround, six, seven months turnaround.

Monem Salam: 
That's a pretty quick turnaround to be honest with you.

Malek Sarhan: 
Pretty quick, pretty ambitious, I would say. It didn't happen, unfortunately, not at that time. And there was some local issues, of course. So I'm not sure how familiar you are with what was happening, but on the automotive industry, I think it's every five years, there's a...no, every four years, there's a UAW, is the, which is the auto workers union. Yes. Contract. So the, in 2023, September of 2023, the UAW goes on strike. And so, you know, all of our factories shut down, all of our, you know, the company is essentially when, when, the UAW goes on strike, it's essentially like a ticking time bomb because it's, I'm not saying not in a bad way. I mean, I mean, they're, course, I'm not here to comment on whether the union was right or wrong, but from the company's perspective, every day that we're not selling cars, we're bleeding money. that CapEx is astronomical. And they had a targeted strike as well, which means, was extremely intelligent because they were, they didn't just have a general strike where they closed down all the factories. They had said, okay, we're going to close down these two or three. I think they started with truck plants, which are like, they started with a mid-sized truck plant, which in the world of automotive is a fairly high revenue vehicle, but they did not shut down the plant like in Arlington or in Flint, which were like full-sized truck plants, which is where the company makes the real money. And they're like, you know, if we don't have an agreement by a certain date, these three plants are going to be on. So anyway, that's just nerding out a little bit about the dynamics of the automotive industry. But yeah, yeah.

Monem Salam: 
Just out of curiosity though, did it ever come, maybe was this something that you guys ever thought about and said, hey, why don't we just approach the union and ask the union to help us to be able to negotiate into the benefits part of it? Was that ever a conversation that you had or amongst yourselves, I mean?

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah. So yeah, the union is so the union is actually like a completely different entity. So so I think we were white collar kind of employees in the engineers and, you know, finance folks and purchasers. At least this is like within the within the like we were salaried employees, I should probably say that. And the union did not represent like, didn't represent the salaried employees at all. It was more so the folks that were in the factory. So it actually was a completely different negotiation. When the union negotiates days off, though, it also kind of impacts us, though. So actually, they negotiated to have Indigenous Peoples Day, and we got it off as well. So there some overlap, but not too much. But I gave you all the details about the union because this was obviously like a huge kind of wrench in the plan of anyone in the HR organization because they would get a proposal from the union about like, is package that we have. This is what we want for compensation. This is what we want our bonuses and our rates to be. And then essentially the HR representatives would have to run a bunch of financial models and see like, this feasible or not? So I'm only illustrating this because it's an extremely like...time intensive and headcount intensive exercise to go through a union negotiation. the people that were responsible for getting our Sharia compliant 401(k) across the finish line were the same people that were negotiating with the union and running those financial models. So naturally, it's not going to be the number one priority of course, mean, in a multi-billion dollar kind of business, which is understandable. December came around and we were slowly becoming late. And so, you know, we'd gotten back into a room and we said, can we get an update? You we were supposed to have, you were supposed to have something by now. And they said, there's just absolutely no way we're going to be able to do this because we're dealing with union negotiations. So we're to have to punt it to later next year, probably. And I think they, they, gave us an interim of like six months. said, you know, in the summer, summer of 2024 is probably when we'll, we'll have something. At this time, I had found out I had gotten into HBS and so I was going to leave GM in the summer of 2024. And so was kind of upset because I really wanted to see it kind of happen while I was there. My goal was to just get it implemented whether or not I was there. And so but the smart thing was that like the executive champion that we had had kind of made sure that we were meeting monthly at this point with the team. So, OK, like we slipped, we understand there's some, you know, know, macro issues at hand, economic issues that are affecting our industry. But let's try not to make this slip anymore. So we would have monthly meetings with this team really through July. And it slowly became clear to us that like they were having intense conversations with Fidelity about like what exactly to offer. So just to give some context, we, we, we recommended the Amana fund, we recommended two, we recommended Amana and Amana Growth as like the number one, like ideal option because they were the most reputable. They also performed very well. I mean, relative to like the S&P, just very high performing funds. I'm personally invested in Amana as well, like outside of of GM. just I was following it. And so I was familiar and the folks that were involved in this, we just know that if you want to show your compliant option, Amana Funds is it's really like your go to. So the conversation converged on Amana with with the the HR benefits folks, and they were like asking us about this and like the history of the fund. And so we directed them to the Saturna Capital.

Monem Salam: 
Yeah, it's really funny that they start asking you and you're not even the expert.

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, I'm really, I'm just an investor. I personally do, but we know, we knew that they were Sharia compliant and that it was a great option. And so of course they were kind of the ones that were going to do the diligence, not really us. And what ended up happening was, you know, the diligence continued. The summer comes along and they're saying, you know, we still need some more time. Fine. Whatever. it was, you know, internal politics things happen. The end of that year, I would say about November of 2024 at this point, by this time I had already moved on to HBS. We had gotten, we had, had kind of pulled everybody into a meeting. I wasn't there because I wasn't at the company anymore, but I was aware of the conversation through the folks that were there. They briefed me after and they had said, okay, we found the path that we're to do this. We're not going to be able to allow, we're not going to be able to like add a 28th option, which is literally like Amana GX or something. What we're going to do is we're going to have, we've negotiated with Fidelity to offer brokerage link, which is essentially where you can just choose any fund on Fidelity and it can just be a total. And so the reason why they were hesitant to do that was because they said, well, maybe if there's a lack of sophistication or something where you're not really able to choose the right options for yourself, or maybe you're investing into something that's actually not really great for a retirement option. They didn't want to put employees in any position. And it's rightfully so they want to put employees in any position where they would be investing their hard earcned and kind of salary dollars and then their retirement funds were just underperforming or not, not doing well at all. that was the concern. Yeah.

Monem Salam: 
Which is funny because you can totally blow up your portfolio in a brokerage account more than you can in a fund. But it is what it is.

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, I truly I mean, I don't know, but that was yeah, so that was that was kind of the answer and so…

Monem Salam: 
It was like a compromise, if you want to call it.

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, and honestly it was fine because at the end of the day we just wanted, we wanted some way to be able to opt into that without any fees or any sort of like extra hurdles. There was one slight hurdle where you actually had to like, you had to transfer your funds into a brokerage link. And then once the brokerage, it was all in brokerage link, you could then kind of invest it in whichever way you see fit. And actually, I think this was a net benefit for the company because whether you're interested in Sharia compliant funds or not, if you're savvy at all in terms of investing, you can kind of personally choose what you want. You can make your own personal blend. But of course the Muslim employees were like ecstatic over this because Fidelity has such a wide breadth of funds that they are offering on their platform, including a lot of Sharia compliant options.

Monem Salam: 
So as you're having these monthly meetings, right? And you were talking to them about, if you want an option, Amana would be a good option. What are some of the objections that you were hearing about along the way? Was it about, you know, like I've heard your objections like, oh, if we allow it for Muslims, we have to allow it for every other, all the religious organizations. I've heard that before. I've also heard the objection of, oh, if you allow employees to choose the funds that they want in, then it's going to be almost like a democracy where you're not choosing based on the best product, you're choosing based on the vote of who likes what. So what are some of those objections and what other ones did you face?

Malek Sarhan: 
That sounds like you're in the room because those are the main objections. Yeah, think the beautiful thing is I think if you talk to other people that have gone through this process, the stories are so similar. Throughout this process, we were in touch with, yeah.

Monem Salam: 
Yeah. And that's the ones, that's the one I'm telling you. I've heard this from other people and that's why I'm mentioning to you.

Malek Sarhan: 
No, exactly. like, you know, the automotive community in Detroit is tiny, right? So like we were once we had gotten that initial green light in May of 2023, like we had kind of mentioned on like the professional Muslims group along the other major car companies like Ford and Stellantis. I think at that time they were Fiat Chrysler. But we had mentioned to them that like, oh, like this is something that looks like is going to go through. They were like. This was like a huge deal for them because they're like, GM is going to do it. We've been trying for years and it was a big catalyst because if GM does something, they're like an industry standard. It totally moves the needle for the industry to be able to adopt that. So they were, everyone was really interested in benchmarking what we were doing. Why I was really happy to come on this podcast. Cause I always get questions from other folks that are at the other OEMs. So the, big car companies or the suppliers, like the Bosch's, you know, they were like, what is, what exactly did it take? And so to outline kind of like how those conversations went. It was a really grueling process. And honestly, there was a lot of like, we had to be really kind of diligent on nagging them. So like we'd have a meeting. It wasn't our executive champion would of course not always be in these meetings because you know, he's running Cadillac. Just a small little company, right?

Monem Salam: 
He's answering my phone calls about my problems with my Cadillac.

Malek Sarhan: 
Hopefully not many problems. Yeah. you know, we were kind of representing, I guess ourselves, and the way it would go is we'd say, you know, can you just outline some of the progress that's happened over the past, you know, month on moving this? And they'd say, you know, like the ball hasn't moved very much. Like these are the, these are the meetings that we've set up with Fidelity. These are the concerns that like our internal HR team has. And some of the concerns, like, as you said, the big one was like, are we going to set a precedent that if we opt in, if we create one specific fund because of the Sharia compliant reason, like what's stopping us from creating a fund anytime anyone causes a reason because it creates a precedent of us saying like, well, why is it okay for this group and not for this group? And also like, if I look at the 27 options, like it's a pretty big blend of like, you've got like, like I said, established fund, like the S&Ps, you've got the social indexes, the world funds, and then you have a bunch of like target retirement date ones, like 2045, 2050. And so to have like a random, like a Amana there, they were saying like, they weren't entirely sure if that would really be the best option. So I think it, I don't know if this would have been faster if it were a smaller company, but like just from my understanding of, working at a larger kind of behemoth of an organization, decisions in general take a long, take a long time. But once a decision is made from just from my experience, once the decision is made, if you have enough of buy-off from like senior leadership, things move really quickly. So I think that like the, the buy-off from leadership was enough to get the to get the issue moving. But every now and then you need a little bit of elbow grease to push it along. So sometimes we'd have two or three meetings, and this is something I would advise anyone that wants to go through this process. We'd have two or three of these meetings, if they're happening monthly, two or three months, where really nothing has moved and we're afraid we're going to slip again. And this is actually what happened. Say it's March or April of 2024. They say they're going to be ready by the summer. Really, we don't have any confidence of that happening. There's no strike going on. Like there's no humongous issue. Of course, I'm sure they're busy, but so, you know, we talked to our executive champion and we say, this is, this is what's happening. We don't think the issue is moving. Can we get a little bit of help here? And then they'll fire off an email and they'll say, you know, we're a little bit concerned. Can you like outline to me a little bit of what the issues are? And of course, like that ruffled feathers in the wrong way. Definitely. Like it was, it's uncomfortable to do that, but like, because I'm, I'm at the working level and I've got working level counterparts and I have a lot of respect for them and we work together. But anytime that something really stalls and something you're really passionate about and you kind of go and you like tell dad and you're like, Hey, like this isn't working. Can you go tell them to get their stuff together? And then that makes its way down to your counterpart on the other side of the working level. That really makes the dynamic for you to a little bit tougher now. Cause it's like, okay, well, all right, you're just going to call dad when things don't go well. Like, so it's, it created a dynamic that was a little bit more tense for sure. I don't think they're a huge fan of me by the end of it because I was very persistent. But at end of the day, think that persistence was needed because I really didn't want us to get to the point where we were like 70, 80% of the way and it would just drop. Because I think if it dropped, it would never be picked up again. Like this was our best chance. And I knew that if like a company as like a Fortune 100 company, like General Motors was able to offer a Sharia compliant option, whether it be through a 28th option or it being a brokerage link kind of bridged way to the rest of the fidelity portfolio, it would absolutely be a catalyst for the rest of the industry to at least say, Hey, we have an example of someone who's doing this. So, you know, we can follow through because there's a lot of in the automotive industry, there's a lot of fast followers.

Monem Salam: 
So what other objections were you getting? Just so that we can kind of document a little bit about maybe other people get the same similar objections.

Malek Sarhan: 
No, no, great. mean, beyond the one where it's like, oh, should we have everybody, would we have everyone like, you know, kind of opt in for their own? Another one was more so like fund like performance. Like that was a huge one where they were saying that like, these are what we have on here right now are established funds that we've spent years diligencing. And actually there was a set time horizon where they said, and this was something that I think was was going to kill it for sure. Where they had said, you know, when we start to evaluate whether or not we're going to add a fund, we look at like a five year time horizon and we start our diligence and we say like, what has been the fund's performance aggregated over five years? And if it's something that meets a certain threshold, I don't know what the exact threshold was, then it would be considered or added or it wouldn't be. And so, and that was more so just to ensure that those funds were, you know, performing well and up to the expectations of, know, if you have an option that's available to 60,000 employees, they wanted to do some diligence. And actually, funny enough, when we, when we got the information from the Ford employees, they had done the same thing. They had gotten their rejection with these, this exact, I have the letter actually still to this day, they had gotten a rejection for this exact reason where they had said their, their, their benefits kind of counterpart had said like, you know, there's the reason why we can't add a fund right now is because we have a time horizon in which we evaluate each fund that we're going to bring on and we do diligence on it. And this just doesn't meet the requirements based off of that time horizon. And so, and that really just killed the deal for them immediately. I mean, for us, it was more so like what, what overcame that? I think like part of it was like us kind of compromising and them compromising. Like it's okay. Well, you just want to be able to have the option. And if we communicate to our employees and we say, if we offer you this bridge, you are fully responsible for any funds that you opt in for, because this is your retirement account. And we said that that's something that our community is okay with because at the moment we are zero. We don't have anybody. So it's better than zero. yeah.

Monem Salam: 
So they offered the brokerage option. You didn't offer to them, right?

Malek Sarhan: 
No, yeah, yeah. was, was, and they had kind of pitched it to us to just to feel the waters. And they said like, like, how does this have to manifest if it's manifested through you being able to pick an option, is that fine? And we said, sure. And I don't, I don't know the background. I don't know if there were other groups that were also tagging up at the same time for other reasons. And maybe this was just like a blanket kind of solution. But from my understanding and the timing of how things happened, it was the push for a Sharia compliant fund, which allowed General Motors to switch to brokerage link for Fidelity. That's my observation.

Monem Salam: 
That's awesome. Now pretty much now all employees at GM across General Motors, the whole company are able to open up a 401(k) account, get the brokerage, then from there invest in whatever they want. It doesn't have to be Sharia, It could be anything, any fund that they want that Fidelity has.

Malek Sarhan: 
Exactly. And I don't know why that's not something that was opted in earlier, other than maybe the communication of you invest at your own risk. I don't know if there's extra funds or like fees that are associated with brokerage. I actually have no idea.

Monem Salam: 
I mean, what are the major objections? So what's fees and liability, right? Those are the two things that have to top everything. So I think one of them is fees because I think for a lot of different ones that I've come across, maybe not GM, is that once you put the money into the 401, the brokerage, when you buy a fund, there's actually a fee associated with that fund. So I don't know. Some have that, some don't. That's one thing. But the other one, is the, you know, the other one was just, it's a headache, right? I mean, obviously Fidelity would have to do more than to do that. And there's a liability. Like if I go in there and I blow up my portfolio and I don't make any money or lose all my money, then is there a possibility that the employee will go back to GM and say, hey, why'd you allow me this opportunity? You should have known you couldn't trust me or whatever it is that people use an excuse for. But I think those are the ones that I've heard that actually are the biggest obstacles to getting even a brokerage fund or brokerage account in there.

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, I'm curious. Have you heard of any other like companies of the size that have opted in to?

Monem Salam: 
So there's 500 Fortune 500, So when we did our research, we found about 250 or so, but half of companies actually do allow a brokerage option. Now, that's a little bit of a, I'll make a disclaimer, not everybody allows 100%. Yeah, some people are 25%, some people 50, this depends on, I don't know their formula is, but not everybody allows 100%. But like about half of the Fortune 500 companies do allow a brokerage option. And I'll tell you a lot of them were done by people like you. I mean really kind of from a Muslim perspective going in there talking to their groups and talking to their employee resource group and then kind of taking it up the ladder and those type of things. And really like for you, all it takes is like one person to stir the pot, right? And just keep pushing it. Keep pushing and pushing and eventually, you either come across the right person, or some person will join your group that's high enough to do it, all those things will begin to happen. I remember at one company, the Muslim resource group got together with the environmental resource group, they got together with the Christian resource group, kind of they all came together and said, what could we do to get this happen? And then they had the brokerage option was the best one for all of them as a compromise. So they ended up doing it over there as well. And then the last one is what you mentioned also, if you have a competitor of yours that's actually doing it, they definitely, everybody else wants to jump on board because it's all about competitive salary and competitive benefits and those type of things. So definitely, you know, the fact that GM got it, I think probably caused other people. Now I do remember, and I think that at that time, because I had a cousin who worked there, Fiat Chrysler did offer a brokerage account. Did you guys know that? Did you kind of push that?

Malek Sarhan: 
I wasn't aware of one. Yeah, I hadn't we didn't know if they had offered a brokerage account, but we were honestly much closer with the Ford kind of process because it was kind of the constant comparison, to be honest.

Monem Salam: 
Okay, yeah. Yeah, and I think that's a really good thing where like in your community, outside of work, mean, have these discussions about, I'm doing this with the 401(k). What do you guys offer? You know, what can we do together or kind of approach it that way and that type of thing. So, I mean, I don't think Ford's there yet, but definitely their eyebrows are raised because of the fact that GM has done it.

Malek Sarhan: 
Yeah, it was, it definitely stirred a lot of, a lot of flames in the pot for them. I will say my, biggest kind of reflection of this whole process was really one thing. And the reason why I think I really wanted to kind of like go and try and do the MBA and, know, see what I could kind of do was honestly, like, I'm very happy that I ended up the way that it did. I, I see this as a win because at the end of the day, any new employees can, there is an option for them to kind of, you know, purify their retirement options. But it took us to essentially beg and plead with a senior executive who happened to be passionate about an issue that was important to us as, and this is something that we can't compromise on, like this is our religion. It's, you know, it's extremely important. It's not something that's like a nice to have. And so for me, it was like, you know, for our communities to really move the needle on like having, you know, a seat at the table, it's going to take a lot more than us just, you know, making allies with individuals that are really kind of in these decision-making capacities. I wanted us to, I want to have a seat at the table. Like, I don't want to have to convince somebody. You have to be that person. You have to go and, you know, make yourself an influential individual at the company and then say, you know what, we're going to make sure that we have options for all of our employees, regardless of their religious faith. And I think that that's like, for me, it was kind of like an eye-opening experience of, like, wow, you know, you really, you have to get in there. Like you have to get in there one way or another.

Monem Salam: 
Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's .But listen, Malek, I really appreciate your time. I think I learned a lot as well just from kind of recollecting on what I've done with other people at different companies, but also new ideas of being able to how to get that brokerage option or even just the halal option within a 401(k). I will say, know, for every dollar that somebody puts in there, I hope you will get the reward for it because I know you tirelessly kind of worked for a few years to be able to do it. Probably didn't see the benefit of it because you left before you were able to do that. But you never know. It might be something where maybe you go back to GM or because of GM somebody else did it that's who you end up working for. The benefits, this is like a spillover benefit that happens across the industry, across industries I should say, because the 401(k) is something that every company has. So I really appreciate not only you doing that for the Muslim community, but also taking the time to be able to share with us. Well, thank you so much for your time.

Malek Sarhan: 
Thanks so much, Monem, great talking to you.

Monem Salam:
Thank you for listening to Halal Money Matters. If you like what you hear, please do rate us on the app stores and also leave us a review. It helps other people find us a lot easier.

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