Peace and Justice
In shortfall: 458,000 people were killed in homicides in 2021, more than armed conflict and terrorism combined, according to the UNODC Global Study on Homicide 2023.
Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
Why shareholder democracy is necessary
Violence reduction and access to justice depend on policing, courts, legal aid and social policy, state functions that no shareholder vote can substitute for. No documented corporate lobbying campaign stands as the blocking obstacle to safer societies at global scale. Corruption and illicit finance, which sit at the core of this dimension alongside violence, nonetheless run to a striking degree through listed companies. The OECD's analysis of 427 concluded foreign bribery cases found firms with more than 250 employees behind 60 percent of cases and management or chief-executive knowledge in 53 percent. The supply side of grand corruption is conduct that owners govern. The money of organized crime, which UNODC links to around 22 percent of global homicides, moves through listed banks. Danske Bank paid over 2 billion dollars in a global money-laundering resolution. TD Bank pleaded guilty in 2024 in a 1.8 billion dollar Justice Department resolution after its weak controls let networks move funds for drug traffickers. The proxy record shows owners already working these levers. Majorities of Sturm Ruger shareholders backed a gun-safety report in 2018 and a human rights impact assessment covering the lethality of its products in 2022. Investor pressure led JPMorgan Chase to stop underwriting private prison operators in 2019, and a Tesla proposal on mandatory arbitration won 66.4 percent of independent votes. Owners therefore supply a necessary input on anti-corruption conduct and on the financial chokepoints of organized crime. States must still deliver the policing, courts and social conditions that determine most violence.
How this was scoredNecessary
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
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
- Global homicides hit record high in 2021 as post-lockdown stress set in, UN News (UNODC Global Study on Homicide 2023), 2023-12-08
- Fifty-two people lost their lives to homicide globally every hour in 2021, says new report from UNODC, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, 2023-12-08
- OECD Foreign Bribery Report: An Analysis of the Crime of Bribery of Foreign Public Officials, OECD, 2014-12-02
- OECD Foreign Bribery Report: An Analysis of the Crime of the Bribery of a Foreign Official, HFW, 2015-02-06
- TD Bank Pleads Guilty to Bank Secrecy Act and Money Laundering Conspiracy Violations in $1.8B Resolution, U.S. Department of Justice, 2024-10-10
- SEC Charges Danske Bank with Fraud for Misleading Investors about Its Anti-Money Laundering Compliance Failures in Estonia, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2022-12-13
- Majority support for shareholder proposal at Sturm Ruger shows growing investor concern with gun violence, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2018-05-09
- Shareholders Approve a Call for a Human Rights Risk Assessment at Sturm Ruger, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2022-06-01
- Shareholders Take A Stand Against Private Prisons, Forbes (Morgan Simon), 2019-03-11
- Tesla Inc: Report on Impact of Use of Mandatory Arbitration, As You Sow, 2022-04-28
7 campaigns on record
The resolution asked Meta's board to adopt measurable, one-year targets for reducing dangers to children on its platforms, track quantitative metrics on progress, and publish both in an annual report so investors could hold the company to them.
With members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility
Result: Support climbed each year among independent (non-Zuckerberg-controlled) shares: 53.8 percent in 2023 and 59.1 percent in 2024, according to Proxy Impact's own tally; the 2024 filing also won recommendations to vote yes from proxy advisors ISS and Glass Lewis. The resolution was refiled again in 2025.
Proxy Impact and As You Sow both describe Meta as having resisted the reforms the resolutions called for; we found no documented instance of Meta publishing the requested annual child-safety metrics report as of the sources reviewed.
Asked Tesla's board to report on whether and how it would eliminate child labor and forced labor, including cobalt mining risk in the Democratic Republic of Congo and concerns about Uyghur forced labor in China, from its supply chain by 2025, and to increase supply-chain transparency.
Result: Per Tesla's own SEC Form 8-K, the proposal received 0 votes for and 2,420,047,519 votes against (100% against). This was a 'floor' proposal not included in Tesla's advance proxy materials or on shareholders' proxy ballots, which is why the recorded 'for' vote was zero.
Despite the zero-vote outcome, CEO Elon Musk publicly committed at the meeting to third-party audits of Tesla's cobalt supply chain ('we will conduct a third-party audit... we'll put a webcam on the mine'). As of a July 2024 Forbes report, the follow-through fell short of that promise: Tesla's main cobalt supplier posted only a single low-resolution monthly satellite photo of the mine rather than live monitoring, and while Tesla said four scheduled (not surprise) audits found no child labor in 2023, an expert said this did not address the risk that cobalt from an estimated 40,000 children working in unregulated artisanal mines gets mixed into the supply chain before reaching Tesla's suppliers.
Tesla Inc. Form 8-K (annual meeting voting results), SEC EDGAR
Asked the bank to publish a report, updated twice a year, on any requests it receives from government officials to close customer accounts, covering who made each request, what it involved, when it was made, what the bank decided and why.
Result: Filed under Rule 14a-8 and never put to a vote. On March 21, 2023 the staff of the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance told the bank it would not recommend enforcement action if the proposal was left out of the proxy statement, on the ground that it could be excluded under Rule 14a-8(i)(7) as relating to ordinary business operations. The staff wrote that the proposal relates to, and does not transcend, ordinary business matters.
we found no documented change
The resolution asked Meta to report on how its plan to roll out end-to-end encryption across its messaging products would affect its ability to detect and stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.
With members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility
Result: By Proxy Impact's own tally: 2020 drew 12.6 percent overall support (43 percent of independent shares); 2021 drew 17.25 percent overall (56 percent of independent shares); 2022 drew 17.3 percent overall (56.7 percent of independent shares).
Proxy Impact reports that Meta continued rolling out end-to-end encryption without publishing the requested report and, according to Proxy Impact, was slow to engage, sometimes taking 12 to 18 months to schedule a call with proponents.
The resolution asked Verizon to show it was properly assessing the risk that child sexual exploitation material could move through its own services, including email, digital advertising, wireless data, and cloud storage.
With Maryknoll Sisters, Benedictine Sisters of Virginia, Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, New Jersey
Result: The resolution received 34 percent of the shareholder vote, representing more than 50 billion dollars in stock.
We found no documented change Verizon made as a result of this vote in the sources reviewed.
Two separate resolutions asked Amazon to stop selling its Rekognition facial-recognition technology to government and law-enforcement agencies, and to commission an independent study of the technology's effect on civil rights and privacy.
Result: The proposal to halt sales to government agencies received 2.4 percent support; the proposal for an independent civil-rights and privacy study received 27.5 percent support.
We found no documented change in Amazon's Rekognition sales policy that resulted specifically from this 2019 vote in the sources reviewed; Amazon defended the product, saying its use was governed by its existing code of conduct.
Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition proposals, TechCrunch
The resolutions asked each company to publish a detailed report on how fake news, election interference, hate speech, and (at Facebook) violent content were spreading on its platform, and on what the company was doing to enforce its own policies against them.
With New York State Common Retirement Fund, Illinois State Treasurer Michael W. Frerichs, Baldwin Brothers Inc., Harrington Investments
Result: Facebook's content-governance proposal received about 30 percent support; a similar proposal at Alphabet received about 36 percent support.
We found no documented policy change that Facebook, Twitter, or Alphabet made specifically in response to these 2018 votes in the sources reviewed; proxy advisor ISS had recommended in favor, saying shareholders would benefit from more disclosure.
Arjuna Capital and NY State Ask Facebook to Explain Plans for Governing Content, Business Wire
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 Doughnut Economics's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.