News & Insights

What employers in the Russell 1000 lead the pack with their parental leave policies in 2024? Here are the five that came to the forefront. 

Amidst all the backlash on ESG and DEI, it’s been interesting to track what’s actually going on behind the scenes at the corporations we track – and why.

As of March 29, 2024, our flagship index – the JUST U.S. Large Cap Diversified Index (JULCD)  – has outperformed the Russell 1000 (Cap-Weighted) benchmark by 0.346% year-to-date and by 10.7% since inception.

Monday is the 54th annual Earth Day, so in honor of that I thought we’d highlight a few companies that are showing extraordinary leadership on environmental matters. 

For Earth Day, we evaluated the 10 companies with the best environmental performance in our 2024 Rankings of America’s Most JUST Companies. Here are the leaders:

Fortune published their 2024 100 Best Places to Work list recently. It’s highly regarded by major employers and obviously reflects a theme we know to be a top priority for the public, so we thought it’d be fun to compare and contrast against our own JUST Jobs Scorecard, which we released last week. 

Investing in human capital is one of the essential elements of business leadership today. But without a comprehensive set of metrics and a clear definition of what good actually looks like, it’s very difficult to know where to invest in order to improve.

Disclosures on the rise, but room for improvement for all of America’s largest companies.

Helping workers prepare for their financial futures is a major JUST issue. And it’s not only a problem for older working Americans. Indeed many Gen X and Millennial adults in the workforce today worry about the costs associated with both caring for their parents as well as their children. 

These leading companies perform well on a number of data points, including offering flexible work hours, disclosing gender diversity data, and performing pay gap analyses.

In the early 2000s, I was fortunate enough to be involved in some of the initial groundbreaking work that brought climate risks forward to the global investor community as a matter of significant financial relevance. This feels similar, but even more urgent.

With the price of everything from gas to food remaining stubbornly high – February’s Consumer Price Index numbers released earlier this week showed inflation actually speeding up slightly – workers struggling to make ends meet seem set for further economic pain. 

6.1 million full-time American workers are not making enough to support a family with another full-time working adult and two children, our latest report with Revelio Labs shows.

The business case for investing in workers is surely watertight at this point. Let’s discuss some of the companies showing why:

Avangrid CFO Justin Lagasse speaks about how the initiative aligns with the energy company’s longterm goals of in a continuing to support employee financial health.

“We want to be a company that attracts top talent to build long-term careers,” said Pedro Azagra, Avangrid CEO.

With the pushback on ESG and ‘woke’ companies now maturing, there is room in America today for a more objective, data-driven framework that supports values-led business leadership.

With the rapid growth and deployment of generative AI, the consumer component of our stakeholder model – particularly in areas like data privacy, product benefit and harm, and customer treatment – is only going to grow in importance in the future. Here’s why.

Can corporate justness can align with local and state social, economic, environmental and political goals? 

“One of the sayings we have at the company is ‘you have to win the right way.'”

JUST 100 Leader Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri joined JUST Capital co-founder Paul Tudor Jones, alongside other executives, to discuss corporate leadership on just business behavior.

“Our job is to create value and my measure of value is not just shareholder value. Ultimately, stock price is a reflection of how you do things and what you deliver. One of the sayings we have at the company is ‘you have to win the right way.’”

Beginning with last year’s 2023 Rankings, we reached out to the same qualifying companies to more accurately capture the experience for gig workers and to ensure that these companies’ scores are more reflective of their entire workforce.

Each year, we factor into our Rankings a variety of events deemed materially detrimental to a company’s just business behavior. This year, ten companies received a unique event treatment.

“Investing in your people, to me, is a really critical component to being a successful company,” HPE’s vice president of benefits, culture, and people experience told JUST Capital.