Article 23: Right to work, just remuneration, equal pay, and to form and join trade unions
Pivotal
Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Why shareholder democracy is pivotal
Millions of low-wage jobs in retail, fast food and warehousing sit above the legal minimum wage only because a company chooses to pay more. Whether a worker can join a union without retaliation depends heavily on how aggressively management resists organizing, since federal labor law is only weakly enforced. Investors have used their votes here. Shareholder votes won pay-gap disclosure at Disney and Lowe's. A shareholder vote at Starbucks on respecting workers' right to organize led to a board oversight committee, though Starbucks later dissolved it and investors are still working to reverse that. On the political side, the restaurant and retail lobby, led by the National Restaurant Association alongside the U.S. Chamber and NFIB, has fought federal minimum-wage increases for over a decade and has helped pass state laws blocking local worker-pay ordinances. Since both company pay decisions and this lobbying operate largely outside legislative reach in practice, shareholder pressure is one of the few levers that can move either one.
How this was scoredPivotal
Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Wage levels above the legal floor, pay-equity practices and whether management tolerates or resists unionization are set inside companies. A statutory minimum wage, the Equal Pay Act/EEOC framework and the National Labor Relations Board's enforcement of organizing rights are also required. Corporate conduct is a necessary but not sole determinant.
Trade associations for the largest low-wage employers, especially the National Restaurant Association working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, NFIB and ALEC, have been a documented, organized and often successful obstacle to raising the federal minimum wage (stuck at $7.25 since 2009) and to local labor-standards ordinances, making corporate political activity a primary blocking force here.
2 and 2, higher of the two, gives Pivotal
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
- Arjuna Capital: 59% of Disney Investors Vote for Racial and Gender Pay Equity Proposal at Annual Meeting, Business Wire, 2022-03-09
- Arjuna Capital: Following Majority Shareholder Vote, Lowe's Releases Racial and Gender Pay Gap Data, Business Wire, 2022-12-14
- Starbucks Shareholders Vote to Support Worker Rights Assessment Proposal, Office of the New York City Comptroller, 2023-03-29
- Starbucks challenged by labor-friendly activist investors, Restaurant Dive, 2026 (accessed 2026-09)
- National Restaurant Association Opposes H.R. 582, "Raise the Wage Act", National Restaurant Association, 2019-03-05
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Filed racial and gender pay-gap disclosure proposals at Disney (59% support, 2022) and Lowe's (58% support, 2022), leading to new pay-gap disclosures.
Mounted a proxy challenge against two Starbucks directors after the company dissolved the labor-oversight committee created by the 2023 vote.
Starbucks challenged by labor-friendly activist investors, Restaurant Dive, 2026 (accessed 2026-09)
Co-filed the 2023 Starbucks worker rights proposal and joined the later proxy challenge over labor oversight.
Starbucks challenged by labor-friendly activist investors, Restaurant Dive, 2026 (accessed 2026-09)
Formally opposed the federal Raise the Wage Act, arguing a $15 minimum wage would cost jobs and harm small operators.
Filed the 2023 Dollar General worker-safety and wages audit proposal, approved with 67.7% support.
Dollar General worker safety proposal passes at shareholder meeting, CNBC, 2023-05-31
4 campaigns on record
Have the board commission and oversee an independent, third-party assessment of Starbucks' adherence to its stated commitments to workers' rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining, covering management non-interference when employees form or join a union and the steps needed to remedy any practice found inconsistent with those commitments.
With Merseyside Pension Fund (represented by PIRC)
Result: Approved at the 23 March 2023 annual meeting as Proposal 8: 418,792,991 for, 386,056,422 against, 10,661,648 abstaining and 152,169,391 broker non-votes, which is 52.0 percent of the votes cast for and against.
Starbucks said in the same 8-K that it was already undertaking an independent third-party human rights impact assessment covering freedom of association and collective bargaining, and it created a board-level Environmental, Partner and Community Impact Committee to oversee labour relations while that audit ran. The committee was later dissolved under chief executive Brian Niccol, which brought a fresh proxy campaign in the 2026 season, reported in March 2026, against two directors by the SOC Investment Group with the New York City and New York State comptrollers and Trillium Asset Management; Starbucks proposed resuming in-person bargaining with Workers United on 30 March 2026. We did not open anything covering what happened after that date.
Report median and statistically adjusted pay gaps by race and gender.
Result: 58% of votes cast in favor, May 2022.
Lowe's published pay-gap data (women's median pay about 97% of men's, minority employees' median about 99% of non-minority, both about 100% on an adjusted basis) and committed to update the disclosure annually.
Report both median and statistically adjusted pay gaps across race and gender, with the associated policy, reputational, competitive and operational risks and the risks to recruiting and retaining diverse talent.
Result: A majority of votes cast supported it at the 9 March 2022 annual meeting, as Proposal 7: 686,478,918 for, 464,919,023 against, 9,767,813 abstaining and 280,795,356 broker non-votes, which is 59.6 percent of the votes cast for and against. The vote came weeks after Disney appealed to the SEC for relief from putting the proposal to a vote, on the ground that it would affect ongoing class action litigation, and the SEC denied the request.
Disney gave no response to the vote during the annual meeting, and we found no pay-gap disclosure or policy change by Disney documented in the pages we opened. The proposal was not refiled at Disney the following season, so the vote stands as the last recorded step in this campaign.
Have the board oversee a report on whether starting pay for all job categories aligns with Walmart's racial-justice commitments.
Result: 22.8% of independent shares and 12.7% of all votes cast in favor; proposal failed.
We found no documented change traceable to this proposal. Walmart later raised its starting wage (to $14 in January 2023) citing a tight labor market, not this resolution.
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 Universal Declaration of Human Rights's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.