Create a national paid family and medical leave program of up to 12 weeks
Families and children
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
A national program covering every worker can only be created by Congress. Employers can give their own workers paid leave now, which advances the underlying outcome company by company. Investors organized 150 institutions managing $3.6 trillion to press more than 40 companies for permanent paid sick leave, and shareholder proposals were filed at CVS, Kroger, Target and TJX, showing an active ownership channel on paid leave benefits. The documented blocker is fiscal politics rather than business opposition: the national program died in December 2021 when Senator Joe Manchin refused to support the bill that carried it, citing the cost of creating a new federal program.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
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
- Common Ground of the American People: Families and Children, Program for Public Consultation / Voice of the People, survey August 2024
- Investors Escalate Pressure on Companies to Adopt Paid Sick Leave Policies, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2021
- Investors push retailers to strengthen sick leave policies, Axios, 2022-01-31
- 'I'm just so upset.' Paid leave advocates react to Manchin opposition to Build Back Better, CNBC, 2021-12-20
2 campaigns on record
Adopt and publish a permanent paid sick leave policy under which every employee, part time and full time, earns paid sick days after a reasonable starting period, with no expiry date and no dependence on a pandemic.
Result: Withdrawn after the company made commitments to the filer.
Target agreed to publish more about the benefits it offers employees, including who is eligible and what paid leave they get.
Target - Paid Sick Leave (2022), Trillium Asset Management, 2022
Adopt and publish a permanent paid sick leave policy under which every employee, part time and full time, earns paid sick days after a reasonable starting period, with no expiry date and no dependence on a pandemic.
Result: Went to a vote in 2022 and drew 26 percent support. The company had asked the SEC for permission to leave it off the ballot.
we found no documented change
CVS Healthcare - Paid Sick Leave (2022), Trillium Asset Management, 2022
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 Common Ground of the American People's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.