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Treats customers fairly
Customers
Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Why shareholder democracy is pivotal
Whether customers are treated fairly is settled inside the company that sells to them, in how a product is designed, what a fee schedule says, what sales targets reward and what happens when someone is harmed, which puts this at the top of the scale on the conduct of the seller alone. The ranking measures the issue with three years of consumer protection, product safety and Federal Trade Commission penalties recorded in Good Jobs First's Violation Tracker and scaled by revenue, so the thing being scored is the company's own behaviour rather than anything a government does. Wells Fargo shows the behaviour and the route owners have to it. The bank's own board investigation into the fake accounts scandal found that directors should have moved faster to fix the decentralised structure that let the scandal spread, and that audit committee members had received materials going back to at least 2002 referring to sales conduct or gaming issues; the proxy adviser ISS recommended votes against almost all of the directors, large pension funds including the New York City Comptroller and the California State Teachers' Retirement System followed that advice, and the board urged shareholders to disregard the report and called its recommendations extreme and unprecedented. Owners have also asked for named changes at named companies. A coalition co-led by Mercy Investment Services and the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust engaged twenty opioid manufacturers and distributors, and its account records that twelve agreed to run risk assessments of their opioid practices, ten agreed to policies allowing executive pay to be recovered after misconduct, and three agreed to split the chair and chief executive roles. Two of the three did it, Cardinal Health in November 2018 under an independent chairman and McKesson with the election of Ed Mueller as independent chair, while AmerisourceBergen kept Steven Collis as chairman, president and chief executive with a lead independent director instead, which is the difference between agreeing to something and doing it. The political half of this is a serious one and it reaches the top on its own. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose board seats executives of Abbott Laboratories, Ryder System, Nasdaq, Cognizant, Allstate and Verizon, says in its own words that it spent more than six years fighting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's rule on forced arbitration clauses, with a coalition, comment letters, advertising and a lawsuit, and that Congress then repealed the rule and barred the Bureau from ever issuing a similar one, which closed customers' route to court for good. The same association, with the Interactive Advertising Bureau and NCTA-The Internet and Television Association, obtained the vacatur of the Federal Trade Commission's rule on cancelling subscriptions in July 2025, and it sued over the cap on credit card late fees, which a court struck down in April 2025, though that last one fell on a consent judgment in which the Bureau agreed it had exceeded its authority. There is a fair objection on the other side, that none of those rules was ever what stopped a bank from charging what it told its customers it would charge or a manufacturer from fixing a dangerous product. Both answers still reach the top, one because fair treatment of customers simply is what a company does, the other because the rules that would have compelled it were asked away by named trade associations and did not survive.
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
- JUST Capital 2025 Ranking Methodology (as of February 3, 2025), JUST Capital
- Wells Fargo scandal: Where was the board? (Internet Archive capture of 12 January 2018), CNN Business
- Shareholders told opioid companies they had an oversight problem; they're starting to listen, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility
- Investors commend Wells Fargo for dropping direct deposit advance product, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility
- Cardinal Health, Inc. 2019 Proxy Statement (DEF 14A), Cardinal Health, Inc., filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- McKesson Corporation 2020 Proxy Statement (DEF 14A), McKesson Corporation, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- AmerisourceBergen Corporation 2020 Proxy Statement (DEF 14A), AmerisourceBergen Corporation, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- A Victory for Consumers and for Justice, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
- Arbitration Agreements, congressional disapproval of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection rule, Federal Register
- Custom Communications, Inc. v. Federal Trade Commission, Nos. 24-3137, 24-3388, 24-3415, 24-3442, 24-3469, United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
- Chamber of Commerce v. CFPB (credit card late fees rule), U.S. Chamber of Commerce Litigation Center
- Board of Directors, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
- McKesson Reduces CEO's Pay 10% Following Revolt by Investors, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, reproducing Bloomberg copy of 15 June 2018
10 campaigns on record
Asked Alphabet to evaluate and report on whether its generative artificial intelligence products treat people differently according to their religion or their political opinions, and on the civil liberties risks that would follow.
Result: Voted on at the annual meeting of 6 June 2025 as Item 10, 'a stockholder proposal regarding a report on risks of discrimination in GenAI'. About 0.46% of the shares voted for and against were in favour (57,074,931 for, 12,419,353,797 against, 39,186,294 abstentions, 619,907,425 broker non-votes). The proposal was not approved. Inspire also filed a notice of exempt solicitation urging a yes vote, signed by about sixty investors and financial professionals.
We found no documented change by Alphabet that any source attributes to this vote.
Form 8-K, results of the 2025 annual meeting of stockholders, Alphabet Inc. via SEC EDGAR
Asked the bank's board to publish a report on how it oversees the risk that it discriminates against people on the basis of race, colour, religion including religious views, sex, national origin, or political views, and on whether such discrimination affects people's exercise of constitutionally protected civil rights.
Result: Voted on at the annual meeting of 1 May 2024 as Proposal 4, titled by the company 'Stockholder proposal requesting a report on the risks of politicized de-banking'. About 2.4% of the shares voted for and against were in favour (552,843 for, 22,687,494 against). Counting the 118,146 abstentions in the base also gives about 2.4% (3,844,720 broker non-votes). The proposal was not approved. Inspire also filed a notice of exempt solicitation urging a yes vote.
We found no documented change by First Citizens BancShares that any source attributes to this vote.
Asked the bank's board to publish a report on how it oversees the risk that it discriminates against people on the basis of race, colour, religion including religious views, sex, national origin, or political views, and on whether such discrimination affects people's exercise of constitutional civil rights.
Result: Voted on at the annual meeting of 26 April 2024 as Item 5, a request for a report on risks of politicised de-banking. About 1.3% of the shares voted for and against were in favour (1,322,381 for, 101,929,606 against). Counting the 1,129,492 abstentions in the base also gives about 1.3%. The 8-K as retrieved did not disclose broker non-votes for this item. The proposal was not approved. Inspire also filed a notice of exempt solicitation urging a yes vote, signed by more than 100 investors and financial professionals.
We found no documented change by Zions Bancorporation that any source attributes to this vote.
Form 8-K, results of the 2024 annual meeting of shareholders, Zions Bancorporation via SEC EDGAR
Asked the bank's board to publish a report on how it oversees the risk that it discriminates against people on the basis of race, colour, religion including religious views, sex, national origin, or political views, and on whether such discrimination affects people's exercise of constitutionally protected civil rights. Inspire described the practice it was targeting as politicised de-banking.
Result: Voted on at the annual meeting of 17 April 2024 as Proposal 5, titled by the company 'Shareholder Proposal Relating to a Report on Risks of Politicized De-Banking'. About 1.6% of the shares voted for and against were in favour (10,634,204 for, 673,164,762 against). Counting abstentions in the base gives about 1.5% (19,189,364 abstentions, 110,818,886 broker non-votes). The proposal was not approved. Inspire also filed a notice of exempt solicitation urging a yes vote, signed by more than 100 investors and financial professionals.
We found no documented change by Regions Financial that any source attributes to this vote.
Asked BNY Mellon to publish a report on the risks the bank faces from what the proposal called politicized de-banking, including the risk of discriminating against potential clients on the basis of their religious or political views.
Result: Precatory proposal filed under Rule 14a-8 and voted on as Proposal 5 at the annual meeting of 9 April 2024. Votes for 19,467,731; votes against 588,664,175; abstentions 11,780,709; broker non-votes 50,755,114. That is 3.20% of the votes cast for and against, or 3.14% if abstentions are counted in the base. The proposal was not approved. The company's Form 8-K records that the corporate secretary presented the proposal at the meeting because neither the proponent nor the proponent's representative was there to present it. No representative of the proponent attended the meeting; the corporate secretary read the resolution so that it could be voted on.
We found no documented change to BNY Mellon's client-selection or account-closure policies that any source we retrieved attributes to this proposal.
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 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 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.
The Teamsters asked shareholders to vote against McKesson's executive pay package, arguing the company had not held leadership accountable for its role in distributing opioids, and separately pushed to split the CEO and board-chair roles.
Result: McKesson's executive pay package received only 26.6 percent shareholder support in the 2018 vote, described at the time as one of the worst results among S&P 500 companies. This was a vote-no campaign against a management-sponsored say-on-pay proposal, not a shareholder-filed resolution.
McKesson cut CEO John Hammergren's total pay by about $1.95 million (roughly 10 percent) and said it would factor opioid-related compliance risk into future pay decisions; in 2021, after an $8.1 billion opioid settlement, the board also imposed a further $2.9 million discretionary reduction to CEO Brian Tyler's pay and cut a former CEO's payments by $780,000.
The coalition asked opioid distributors and manufacturers to strengthen board oversight of opioid-related risk, review whether executive bonuses were tied to opioid sales volume, and add clawback policies so pay could be taken back after misconduct.
With Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility members, state and city pension funds, Catholic and other faith-based investors
Result: As of October 15, 2018, one year into the campaign, the coalition had submitted 35 resolutions at 11 public companies, of which 10 had received shareholder votes, including majority votes among independent voters at Assertio Therapeutics (formerly Depomed) and AmerisourceBergen, per National Catholic Reporter. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility's later retrospective gives a wider total of 20 companies engaged, reports that a majority of shareholder proposals, 52%, led to agreements with the companies rather than a vote, and counts seven resolutions winning majority votes at Rite Aid, Walgreens, Mallinckrodt, Mylan and Assertio Therapeutics plus two more winning majority support at AmerisourceBergen. The coalition's resolutions were filed across the 2017 to 2019 proxy seasons, and SHARE's account of the full run to 2023 describes more than 100 proposals.
Twelve of the companies engaged conducted opioid-related risk assessments, ten adopted misconduct clawback policies, and three separated the chair and CEO roles, those three being McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen, according to the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility's account of the coalition's tally.
To stem opioid crisis, investment coalition pressures supply chain, National Catholic Reporter
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.