Article 24: Right to rest and leisure, limitation of working hours, and periodic holidays with pay
Necessary
Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
Why shareholder democracy is necessary
In the United States, unlike almost every other wealthy country, no law requires an employer to give any worker a single day of paid vacation or a paid holiday. As of 2021, only 79% of private-sector workers had any access to paid vacation at all, ranging from 95% in manufacturing and finance down to 43% in leisure and hospitality, so a large share of the gap sits entirely inside company policy. Working hours are only partly reached by law. Federal overtime pay rules raise the cost of long shifts but do not cap them, leaving actual scheduling, rest breaks and shift length up to employers. That is why shareholders have raised grueling schedules at warehouse and freight companies. No senator has yet been able to force a floor vote on guaranteeing paid vacation nationally, so the corporate lobbying fight that exists around paid sick leave has not yet been repeated here.
How this was scoredNecessary
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
No U.S. federal or state law guarantees any paid vacation or holiday, so whether a worker gets paid time off at all is set entirely by employer policy. Federal overtime law (the Fair Labor Standards Act) still constrains the cost, though not the amount, of long hours. Law therefore remains a partial actor alongside the employer.
We found a strong, well-documented business lobbying campaign against paid sick-leave mandates (see Article 25). We found no comparably organized, company-named lobbying campaign specifically opposing a paid-vacation mandate, since no such federal bill has advanced far enough to draw one. The same trade associations are positioned to oppose one but have not yet had to fight one in the open.
2 and 1, higher of the two, gives Necessary
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
- 79 percent of private industry workers had access to paid vacation in 2021, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Economics Daily, 2022-08-31
- Sanders Introduces Legislation to Finally Guarantee Paid Vacation to US Workers, U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, 2024-03-22
- Investors Call for Paid Sick Leave Policy at Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific Railways, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2022-12-05
- Norfolk Southern gives some workers paid sick days after crash, CBS News, 2023-02-23
- Amazon shareholders vote down audit of warehouse work conditions, Computer Weekly, 2022-05
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Filed a 2022 shareholder proposal asking Norfolk Southern to adopt a standard paid sick/personal leave policy, which bears on rail workers' ability to get any day of rest without discipline under strict attendance systems.
Filed the parallel 2022 shareholder proposal at Union Pacific on paid leave policy.
Filed a 2022 shareholder proposal for an independent audit of Amazon warehouse working conditions, which the company's board opposed and shareholders voted down.
Amazon shareholders vote down audit of warehouse work conditions, Computer Weekly, 2022-05
2 campaigns on record
Adopt an employer-paid sick leave policy as a standard, perennial benefit, easing the attendance systems that penalised rail workers for taking any day off.
With Trillium Asset Management (at Union Pacific)
Result: Announced on 5 December 2022, filed at both railroads for the 2023 annual meetings: Impact Shares at Norfolk Southern and Trillium Asset Management at Union Pacific. It reached a vote at one of the two. Union Pacific, 18 May 2023, Proposal 7: rejected, 53,102,043 for, 400,261,287 against, 7,238,541 abstaining and 67,585,896 broker non-votes, or 11.7 percent of the votes cast for and against. No paid sick leave proposal appears in the certified results of Norfolk Southern's meeting on 11 May 2023, whose only shareholder proposal concerned the rights of street name and non-street name shareholders.
Norfolk Southern agreed in February 2023, three months before its annual meeting, to give about 3,000 unionised track maintenance workers four paid sick days a year and to drop the 48-hour notice its contracts required before a personal day; CBS News credits union pressure after the East Palestine derailment rather than the shareholder proposal, and Norfolk Southern was the third major rail company to grant sick days after the crash. The proposal then did not reach a vote there. At Union Pacific it was voted down and we found no comparable policy change.
Commission an independent audit of warehouse working conditions, covering injury rates and pace-of-work pressure that limits workers' rest during shifts.
Result: Not approved at the May 25, 2022 annual meeting, where it was item 16 on the ballot and was introduced by Isaiah Thomas, an Amazon employee at the Bessemer, Alabama facility. The certified count was 163,081,744 votes for and 207,204,341 against, with 2,584,444 abstentions and 53,465,310 broker non-votes, which is 44 percent of the votes cast for and against. Tulipshare puts support among shares independent of company insiders at 53.4 percent, a majority. Tulipshare refiled the proposal in 2023, when it records 35.4 percent of the overall vote.
No change to Amazon's warehouse audit practices attributable to this vote was found in the sources opened.
Amazon shareholders vote down audit of warehouse work conditions, Computer Weekly
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.