JUST CapitalBeta
Protects worker health and safety
Workers
Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Why shareholder democracy is pivotal
Whether a job is safe is settled by how a company staffs, equips, trains and maintains the place where the work happens, and none of that waits on a regulator, which is why this rates at the top of the scale. Shareholders have already moved a company on exactly that question. At Dollar General's annual meeting in May 2023, investors led by Domini Impact Investments passed a resolution calling for an independent audit of worker safety, over the board's recommendation to vote against it, and the company went on to publish that audit, carried out by the law firm Jackson Lewis with the independent safety consultancy FDRsafety, and said it intended to add more than 100 new district managers during 2024. Investors coordinated by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility pressed Walmart on worker safety before its 2024 meeting; ICCR describes itself as a coalition of more than 300 institutional investors representing over $4 trillion, and the assets behind that particular statement's signers are not published separately. The political fight is real without being what stands in the way. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose board seats are held by executives of publicly traded companies including Abbott Laboratories, Shell USA, Verizon, Pfizer and Dow, has asked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to withdraw its proposed heat injury and illness prevention standard and start again with a looser one, and that standard has been neither withdrawn nor finished. State preemption has achieved more. Texas House Bill 2127, signed in June 2023, stripped construction workers in Austin and Dallas of the water and shade breaks their cities had already guaranteed them, and Florida's HB 433 bars local governments from setting heat protections at all, a ban reporting found appeared to target the heat exposure standard Miami-Dade County was weighing after agricultural industry lobbyists had watered it down and delayed the vote. Those accounts name legislators, a governor and an industry rather than a listed company or an association shown to be funded by one, so that spending narrows the public route without being the obstacle itself. A company that decides how many people are on shift, what they are trained to do and whether the fire exit is clear can fix this on its own, which is why the outcome rests on corporate conduct above all.
How this was scoredPivotal
Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- Dollar General shareholders pass proposal to improve worker safety, CNBC
- Report on Audit of Dollar General Safety Policies and Practices, Dollar General
- In Advance of Walmart's 2024 Shareholder Meeting, Investors Call on the Company to Address Worker Safety and Racial Inequity, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility
- Chamber Comments on OSHA's Proposed Heat Rule, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
- U.S. Chamber Board of Directors, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
- Backlash brews against Texas law that eliminates mandatory water breaks, NBC News
- Florida Legislature approves bill blocking local workplace heat protection standards, Orlando Weekly
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Coordinated more than 300 institutional investors with over 4 trillion dollars in assets to back four 2024 Walmart proposals, including a workplace safety assessment focused on violence prevention.
Filed repeated proposals at Amazon asking for an independent audit of warehouse working conditions and worker treatment.
7 campaigns on record
Audit internal policies to protect employees from workplace violence, particularly gun violence.
Result: 19.1 percent in 2024, down from 23.8 percent in 2023
Walmart Shareholders Lose Support for Gun Safety Proposal, Bloomberg Law, 2024-06
Commission an independent audit and report on warehouse workers' conditions and treatment and the effect of Amazon's policies, management practices, performance metrics and targets.
Result: 31.2 percent of votes cast in favor
Commission an independent outside review of how company policies and practices affect safety and violence in its stores, including gun violence.
Result: Voted down at the June 5, 2024 annual meeting with about 19.1 percent support, after 23.8 percent the year before.
we found no documented change
Walmart announces 2024 annual shareholders meeting voting results, Walmart, 2024-06-05
Report on working conditions, citing constant surveillance, demanding quotas and the punitive time-off-task tracking system.
Result: 35.4 percent
Hire an independent outside firm to audit how company policies and practices affect the safety and well being of workers, and publish what it finds.
With Portico Benefit Services
Result: Approved over the board's opposition at the May 31, 2023 annual meeting, where it was Proposal 7. The certified count was 122,752,549 votes for and 58,562,783 against, with 4,051,930 abstentions and 11,395,363 broker non-votes, which is 67.7 percent of the votes cast for and against.
Dollar General said after the vote that it was awaiting the final report and would report the results in a Form 8-K. The audit report it later published sits on its own site as a PDF, which this pass could not open, so its findings are not verified here; no Form 8-K carrying them was found among the company's filings through the end of 2024.
Dollar General worker safety proposal passes at shareholder meeting, CNBC, 2023-05-31
Asked Tyson's board to prepare a report on human rights due diligence, covering whether the company was doing enough on paid sick leave, COVID-19 testing and case counts, workload, and meaningful engagement with workers after over 12,500 workers were infected and dozens died during the pandemic.
With Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes, Congregation of St. Joseph, OH, Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, Daughters of Charity, Province of St. Louise, Northwest Women Religious Investment Trust, PeaceHealth, Portico Benefit Services (ELCA), Sisters of Bon Secours, Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth, NJ, Sisters of Providence, Mother Joseph Province, Sisters of St. Francis of Dubuque, IA, Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Dominican Sisters of Springfield, IL, Sisters of the Humility of Mary, BMO Asset Management
Result: Not approved at the February 11, 2021 annual meeting. The certified count was 168,155,962 votes for and 746,977,377 against, with 1,333,787 abstentions and 26,870,881 broker non-votes, which is 18.4 percent of the votes cast for and against. The Tyson family's supervoting Class B stock carries most of the voting power, and Investor Advocates for Social Justice put support among independent investors, excluding the Tyson Limited Partnership, at 78.7 percent. This was the third year the proposal had been filed at Tyson: in 2020 it drew 14.58 percent overall and 59.68 percent of independent shares. BlackRock and Vanguard voted for it, and Norges Bank and CalSTRS pre-declared support.
Tyson did not address the concerns the proposal raised, withheld preliminary vote results at the meeting and released them on its website on February 17, and gave shareholders no opportunity to ask questions; the meeting lasted under thirty minutes. No policy change at Tyson attributable to this vote was found in the sources opened.
A coalition of over 120 organizations demanded Tyson Foods provide personal protective equipment, paid sick leave, slower slaughter-line speeds, comprehensive COVID-19 testing, physical distancing, protection from retaliation for workers who organize, and elimination of a punitive attendance point system, after over 8,500 workers across 37 facilities tested positive for COVID-19 and more than 25 died.
With Friends of the Earth, HEAL Food Alliance, The Humane League, Venceremos, 120+ other organizations
Result: This was a public pressure campaign and sign-on letter directed partly at Tyson's institutional investors, not a shareholder resolution put to a vote.
We found no documented company-wide policy change directly attributed to this July 2020 campaign; continued investor dissatisfaction with Tyson's response is documented in the February 2021 shareholder vote listed separately above.
Related subjects on other maps
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is JUST Capital's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.