JUST CapitalBeta
Supports workforce retention, advancement, and training
Workers
Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Why shareholder democracy is pivotal
What a company spends on training, whom it promotes and whether it keeps the people it hires are decisions made entirely inside the business, so changing them does not merely move this outcome, it is the outcome, which is why this rates at the top of the scale. Investors have built real machinery to see that record. The Human Capital Management Coalition, twenty five institutional investors representing over $2.8 trillion in assets, petitioned the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2017 to require companies to disclose how they manage their workforce, and in August 2020 the Commission adopted a human capital disclosure requirement. What it adopted was principles-based, leaving every company to decide for itself what is material and what to report. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness welcomed that outcome and said it had long advocated for exactly such changes, while Commissioner Allison Herren Lee dissented, saying she would have backed the rule had it required simple, commonly kept figures on part time versus full time workers, workforce expenses, turnover and diversity. The expanded rule that would have added standardized metrics on turnover, training and workforce composition was then dropped from the Commission's short and long term agendas in the Spring 2025 Regulatory Flex Agenda under Chairman Paul Atkins, a withdrawal the available reporting ties to new leadership and a stated deregulatory agenda rather than to any documented lobbying campaign. We found no documented shareholder proposal or coordinated investor statement asking a company to raise or report its own spending on worker training or upskilling, as distinct from disclosing hiring, promotion and retention figures by demographic group, which tells a reader where advocacy has not yet gone and nothing about who holds the decision. Schools and the wider job market shape what a worker brings through the door, and nobody has shown with a figure that any part of what happens afterwards, the training budget, the promotion ladder and the decision to keep somebody on, sits with an actor the company's owners cannot reach. Corporate lobbying here has thinned what investors are allowed to see rather than stopped companies from acting, and nothing outside the company decides whether it trains and advances the people already on its payroll, which is why this rates at the top.
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
- $2.8 Trillion Investor Coalition Petitions U.S. SEC To Require Increased Disclosure Of Human Capital Management Information, Human Capital Management Coalition via PR Newswire
- SEC Adopts Rule Amendments to Modernize Disclosures of Business, Legal Proceedings, and Risk Factors Under Regulation S-K, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- SEC Adopts Disclosure Rule on Human Capital Management, Thomson Reuters
- SEC's Spring 2025 Regulatory Flex Agenda Signals a Strategic Pivot, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
A coalition of 25 asset owners with over 2.8 trillion dollars, led by the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, that engages companies and market participants on human capital management and petitioned the SEC in 2017 for workforce disclosure rules.
Human Capital Management Coalition, SOC Investment Group, 2024
Ran a multi-year engagement asking nearly all of its portfolio companies to disclose EEO-1 workforce composition data annually, lifting disclosure from about 20 percent to 54 percent of holdings between 2021 and 2022.
Q2 ESG Impact Report: 2023 Proxy Season, Boston Trust Walden, 2023-07
Filed a 2024 proposal asking Expeditors International to report hiring, promotion and retention rates by gender, race and ethnicity.
7 campaigns on record
Enhance workforce reporting to include employees by gender and race in each of the nine EEOC job categories and quantitative workforce trend metrics.
Result: not stated in source
Report quantitative hiring, promotion and retention rates by gender, race and ethnicity so investors can assess the effectiveness of workforce programs.
Result: 35.7 percent in favor
Disclose hiring, promotion and retention rates to demonstrate the effectiveness of workforce diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Result: More than 57 percent in favor
Q2 ESG Impact Report: 2023 Proxy Season, Boston Trust Walden, 2023-07
Asked Walmart's board to commission an independent, third-party racial equity audit analyzing the company's impact on Black, Indigenous and People of Color communities and employees, with the results made public and improvements recommended. Related investor materials tied this to workers' difficulty advancing into management.
Result: Sources give slightly different figures for the same vote. Sourcing Journal, via Yahoo Finance, reports 18.1% of votes cast in favor. Majority Action reports 18.2% of all shares voted, and 42% of shares voted by shareholders independent of the Walton family. The 0.1 percentage point difference may reflect rounding or a different vote-count base. The proposal did not pass. Filed under SEC Rule 14a-8.
We found no documented racial equity audit completed by Walmart in response to this vote. Refiled versions of the same ask failed in 2024 and 2025, drawing 15.4% and 6.9% support respectively per the Sourcing Journal account, which indicates the audit had not been carried out.
Walmart faces racial equity audit shareholder proposal, Governance Intelligence
Asked Amazon to disclose its workforce turnover rates as an indicator of job quality.
Result: Amazon reported that shareholders voted against every proposal on the ballot at its May 25, 2022 annual meeting. The sources reviewed did not include the exact vote percentage for this specific proposal.
We found no documented turnover-rate disclosure published by Amazon that sources attribute to this proposal.
Asked Amazon's board to commission an independent third-party audit of how productivity quotas and surveillance practices affect injury and turnover rates among warehouse workers.
With three unnamed co-filers, per source
Result: Amazon petitioned the SEC to exclude the proposal, arguing it involved ordinary business operations. The sources reviewed did not confirm the SEC's ruling or a final vote result.
We found no documented change to Amazon's productivity-quota or warehouse surveillance practices attributed to this proposal in the sources reviewed.
Investors, regulators, Congress focus on companies' treatment of workers, Roll Call
Asked Amazon's board for an independent examination of the company's policies, practices and products on civil rights, equity, diversity and inclusion, including pay and advancement and the disparate racial impacts on hourly warehouse workers, and how those affect the business.
Result: Sources give slightly different figures for the same vote. The Comptroller's office reports 44.18% support, which it described as a record level of support for an environmental or social shareholder proposal at Amazon at that time. ICCR reports 44% of total shares voted and 55% of independent shareholders' shares in favor. The proposal was refiled for the 2022 proxy season and then withdrawn before that vote.
Amazon agreed to commission an independent racial equity audit led by former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. We found no documented publication of the completed audit's findings and no other resulting policy change that sources attribute to this vote.
Shareholders' ESG Proposals Make Significant Gains at Amazon, ICCR
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.