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.
There may be more people in this boat than you think. New analysis co-produced by JUST Capital and Revelio Labs, a workforce intelligence company that we routinely partner with,
found that just over 36% of all U.S.-based Russell 1000 workers are not making a family-sustaining living wage. That means about 6.1 million full-time workers at big publicly-traded corporations do not make enough in the counties where they live (a living wage is location-dependent) to support a family, assuming another full-time working adult and two children. Almost 20% do not earn enough to meet their own basic needs, meaning, a living wage for one full-time employee without dependents.
Solving for every American to get by, and get ahead, is obviously a complex issue with multiple interrelated causes and many (often contested) potential solutions. One thing we know for sure though, is that big employers can make a difference. Increasing wages is part of it, and over the years we’ve engaged hundreds of companies that have done just that. But it’s not the only solution. Lowering the cost of benefits; providing pathways for stock ownership and profit sharing; helping employees with credit support and loan facilities; advancing financial literacy and management skills; even engaging workers on the issue, can all help.
This is what the companies in our Worker Financial Wellness Initiative are focused on, and how many of the companies we rate highly on Workers in our rankings (firms like Cigna, Dayforce, and Ally Financial, for example) approach the problem. There’s also a powerful business case. Our Workers Index, which tracks market performance of our top performing companies on Worker issues overall has outperformed the Russell 1000 by 14.1% over the period from Dec 31 2021-July March 11 2024.
Be well,
Martin
“We want to be a company that attracts top talent to build long-term careers. We do this by not only helping our employees grow professionally, but also supporting their well-being. The Worker Financial Wellness Initiative will cement us as a benefits leader and help us continue to enhance our programs and resources.”
In a new analysis with Revelio Labs, JUST reports that 36% of Russell 1000 workers don’t make a family-sustaining wage.
The Washington Post reports that thanks to the AI boom and the push for more clean-tech across the country, our electric grid is being stressed further than it has ever been, and regulators are looking for ways to increase power and improve our aging grid.
According to Fortune, after being out of the public eye for several months, a photo of Kate Middleton with her family is raising eyebrows for potentially being fabricated by AI, bringing more concern to the power of the technology and those using it.
Boeing is overhauling their pay structure following the safety failures around their 737 Max planes, tying more of their employee and executive incentive pay to safety. Meanwhile, a major story this week is that John Barnett, the whistleblower who was first to raise safety concerns with these aircrafts, was found dead the day after he testified in a deposition, NPR reports.
Business Insider reports that starting April 1, restaurant chains that have at least 60 restaurants nationally will be required to pay workers in California at least $20 an hour — 25% higher than the state’s general minimum wage. The question on everyone’s mind: Will local mom & pop coffee shops and eateries also have to raise prices to compete, and will they be able to?
The Tik Tok ban bill has officially passed the House vote and now goes to the Senate. The Washington Post has the story.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Dollar Tree will be eliminating 1,000 stores nationwide thanks to rising inflation, store theft, and merger woes.
In only a few short days since its announcement, the SEC’s landmark climate rule already faces litigation from across the political spectrum. The Verge has the details.
The anti-poverty nonprofit Oxfam America, the nonpartisan Pre-Distribution Initiative, and the philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network publish a new report on how investors can foster a more inclusive form of capitalism.
This snapshot of a longer chart from our media partner CNBC details which goods and services saw the most price hikes. As JUST’s Martin Whittaker discusses above, consumers are grappling with higher costs on everything from care insurance to childcare, a harsh reality for many workers as our recent report with Revelio Labs finds that over one third of Russell 1000 workers do not make a family-sustaining living wage. Explore the full chart here and the report here.
By Aleksandra Radeva, Lisa Simon, and James Enright
Americans care that companies pay a fair, living wage. In fact, JUST Capital’s report “2023 Issues Survey – The People’s Priorities,” which measures the business issues most important to the public, found that paying a fair, living wage was the highest priority for a fourth consecutive year, garnering widespread support as the top issue across almost every demographic group. In a year marked by high inflation and increasing cost of living around the country, the focus on living wages – or a wage rate that allows workers to meet basic budgetary needs – comes as no surprise.
To gain deeper understanding of wages at Russell 1000 companies, JUST Capital continued its partnership with Revelio Labs, a workforce intelligence company that provides data and insights on employment at any company by using advanced techniques in machine learning.
This year’s results of the joint analysis show that among all U.S.-based Russell 1000 workers, 36.3% of workers are not making a family-sustaining living wage. That’s about 6.1 million full-time workers who are not making enough to support a family with another full-time working adult and two children. The analysis further estimates that about 19.2% of Russell 1000 workers do not earn enough to meet their own basic needs – or a living wage for one full-time employee without dependents.
These estimates are generated through the cutting-edge modeling techniques deployed by Revelio Labs. By absorbing and standardizing hundreds of millions of public employment records, Revelio Labs is able to infer employment compositions at any company, like how many people work at a company, the composition of workers in terms of roles and backgrounds or demographics, where a company’s workers live, and what those workers earn. In collaboration with JUST Capital, Revelio produces estimates for three data points used to measure performance on wages across America’s largest companies. To learn more about how these estimates are derived and how they feed into JUST Capital’s annual ranking of America’s Most JUST Companies, read our methodology summary or dig deeper into our full methodology.
Russell 1000 companies are the highest-performing public companies – and their workers, who make up around 10% of the U.S. workforce, earn more on average than other workers. In 2023, the median worker in the US earned $58,084 annually, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the median Russell 1000 worker earned 26.2% more – or $73,305. Russell 1000 workers also enjoyed higher wage gains in 2023, compared to average workers, which provided them with a slight advantage when weathering cost of living increases in 2023.
Industries naturally vary by their share of workers earning a living wage, depending on their composition of high-wage and lower-wage earners. Software and Biotech tend to have very high living wage scores, for example, as they typically employ many high wage earners and fewer workers in roles such as production or retail, which tend to be lower paid. Nevertheless, large variation in the share of workers earning a living wage exists within industries as well. This intra-industry range is evident in the chart below, which shows the difference between the average and highest shares of employees earning a living wage for a selection of industries. In the Industrial Goods industry, the difference is particularly striking – on average only 70% of workers in the industry are estimated to earn a living wage, but Rockwell Automation is estimated to pay almost 90% of its workers a living wage. Wayfair and Expedia also far outperform their industry average because their employee composition and core business differ from their industry peers, more closely resembling Tech companies than Retail and Restaurant and Leisure companies, respectively.
Last year, we compared all Russell 1000 worker salaries to one population-weighted national living wage threshold, no matter where a worker lives and works. This geographically generalized approach creates some unfair comparisons two ways: The relatively higher wage rates of workers in high-cost-of-living areas were being compared to a national cost-of-living threshold that was much too low compared to the cost those workers actually face. For example, the regional threshold for a two-adult, two-children household in the metropolitan area of New York City is $30.79 – 23% higher than the average national living wage threshold in 2023, $25.02. On the other hand, workers in low-cost areas of the country were being held to a much higher threshold than locally necessary. This year, Revelio Labs and JUST Capital decided to adopt a localized approach and compare worker salaries to the living wage threshold in their metropolitan area – a more ‘just’ comparison for everyone.
Interestingly, the difference in methodology makes little difference in the average share of workers earning a living wage. Under the national threshold, 65.4% of workers make a living wage, as opposed to 63.7% in the local threshold. The slightly lower share under the local threshold suggests that relatively more Russell 1000 workers live in high-cost areas. Comparing their wages to a local threshold makes it harder to meet the threshold.
This is not true across all industries. Some industries fare better using local thresholds, while most industries do slightly worse. The industries with higher shares of workers earning a living wage using geographically-specific thresholds are those with high concentrations of workers living in low-cost-of-living areas. Energy, Big Oil, and Chemical industries saw the greatest positive shift in the share of workers making a living wage. Media companies, on the other hand, have a higher share of workers in high-cost metropolitan areas, and their performance falters with the application of the correspondingly higher local living wage thresholds.
In the coming weeks, we’ll use further insights from these wage models to explore how America’s largest companies align with the increasing priority Americans place on creating equitable and just jobs.
We invite you to continue learning about the power of a living wage and its important role as a corporate threshold in this explainer co-authored by JUST Capital and MIT Living Wage Calculator. You can explore what prioritizing employees’ financial wellness looks like through the stories of companies participating in the Worker Financial Wellness Initiative, implemented in partnership with PayPal, Financial Health Network, and Good Jobs Institute. And if you’d like to participate in JUST Capital’s growing network of corporate leaders committed to advancing worker wellbeing, please reach out at impact@justcapital.com to request more information or a conversation.
If you would like to learn more about the methodology behind JUST Capital’s and Revelio Labs’ wage models or your company’s performance in them, please reach out to our corporate engagement team at corpengage@justcapital.com.
If you would like more information or access to company workforce data, including salaries, headcounts, or employee composition to benchmark your company to your peers, please reach out to info@reveliolabs.com.
Lisa Simon is the Chief Economist and James Enright is a Research Analyst at Revelio Labs.
The business case for investing in workers is surely watertight at this point. Strengthening career pathways, training, wages, work schedules, health benefits and all-round workforce culture is associated with greater employee engagement, higher productivity, increased retention and other advantages, all of which contribute to superior competitive performance, higher shareholder returns and more. As an aside, our worker-focused index outperformed the Russell 1000 Equal Weighted Index by a massive 103.75% from 1/1/2018 through the end of January this year.
Worker issues also present opportunities for corporations to demonstrate their own unique brands of leadership. As an example, we’re excited to report that the energy company Avangrid (NYSE:AG) – a 2024 JUST 100 member ranking 12th overall and #1 in the utilities industry – announced this week it is joining our Worker Financial Wellness Initiative. Co-founded in partnership with PayPal, the Financial Health Network and Good Jobs Institute, the Initiative supports companies in advancing worker economic wellbeing and is a key part of our Corporate Impact Lab, where we help companies collaborate to take concrete actions in key stakeholder areas.
Looking down the list of companies that top their industry on worker issues in our 2024 Annual Rankings you might see some names that surprise you: Zillow, Amazon, Peloton, Cummins, Disney, Nike, Trane, Keysight Technologies, eBay, RTX, Hasbro, and QuantumScape (Automobiles and Parts in case you were wondering). Each leads in its own way. And their policies, ranging from industry-leading wages to flexible working schedules and sick leave, are exactly the kind of thing the public wants to see. Interestingly, in a survey of 600 C-Suite and HR leaders released this week, improving child care benefits was voted the most important major work benefit priority in 2024. Happily, we track that too.
Be well,
Martin
“Modern consumers want to do good. They don’t just want to buy a product – they want their product to have a story and create a positive impact. But how do they know if a company is truly aligned with their values or just greenwashing?
The Karma Wallet Card, launching spring 2024, will directly integrate JUST Capital’s ratings into every transaction – alongside 40+ other data sources, allowing cardholders to see the ethical score of the companies they purchase from in real-time … Knowledge is power – and when consumers are provided with actionable knowledge, they can make better choices.”
– Jayant Khadilkar, CEO and Co-Founder of Karma Wallet.
Avangrid joins JUST Capital and PayPal’s Worker Financial Wellness Initiative. Check out the company press release here.
Karma Wallet announces a partnership with JUST Capital, using our data to help consumers align their spending with their values.
The corporate rush for A.I. dominance is causing a major increase in many company’s carbon footprints as data farms balloon and more energy is needed for processing power. The New York Times has the full story.
CNBC speaks to an engineer who is worried that Microsoft’s Copilot Designer app is not safe for its “E for everyone” rating, saying that the app can create incredibly violent images with the right prompts.
The Securities and Exchange Commission this week adopted rules to enhance and standardize climate-related disclosures by public companies. As The Wall Street Journal explains, the disclosures are slightly watered down from what was proposed by not including Scope 3 requirements, but many companies could find themselves facing pressure from investors and other countries to track them anyway.
The Washington Post reports that the JetBlue and Spirit Airlines merger has been killed in the wake of antitrust objections to the deal. The merger would’ve created the 5th largest airline company in the world.
Bloomberg reveals that 56% of America’s largest companies are boosting childcare perks in 2024, with the rising cost of childcare becoming a consistent pain point for their employees. In a similar vein, JUST 100 company AT&T recently highlighted their investment into fertility and family planning support, another area companies are putting resources in.
A number of investors in Apple issued a joint statement raising concern over the company’s approach to unions after retail employees accused the company of “intimidation tactics to deter organizing”, claims denied by Apple. Apple has agreed to commission a third-party report on its union-related activity, The Financial Times reports.
Bloomberg dives deep into recent Harris Poll data on how Americans’ views of remote work are changing. Interestingly, while a majority of Americans believe remote work has become unnecessarily politicized, they also believe that employees need to stop complaining about having to go back to in-person work. Look at all the data here.
For Justin Lagasse, CFO of leading sustainable energy company Avangrid, using a stakeholder model for decision making is just as much about driving business outcomes as it is about doing what’s right for customers, workers, the environment, and shareholders.
Despite pushback against Environmental Social and Governance frameworks, or ESG, Lagasse said that applying a broader stakeholder model, where decisions prioritize sustainable business practices, is not purely about compliance, but about driving long-term value.
“What’s really happened on the ESG front is it’s become about disclosures and compliance and I think because of that, it’s dissociated the value attribution that it provides,” Lagasse said at JUST Capital’s 2024 Annual Leadership Summit earlier this month. “We use ESG to drive business and financial outcomes.”
Avangrid ranked highly in JUST Capital’s 2024 Annual Rankings of America’s Most JUST Companies at No. 12 overall and No. 1 in its industry. It earned these designations through a variety of investments, including supporting the career development of its workforce and demonstrating a clear commitment to climate leadership, such as pursuing an aggressive 1.5-degree net zero climate target.
Speaking with JUST Capital President Alison Omens, Lagasse noted that in today’s economic climate, a company’s investment in its workers not only serves as a catalyst for individual prosperity and job satisfaction but also contributes significantly to a business’ resilience and sustainable growth.
On Wednesday, Avangrid announced it was joining The Worker Financial Wellness Initiative, a part of JUST Capital’s corporate leadership network implemented in partnership with PayPal, Financial Health Network, and Good Jobs Institute. Joining the initiative will help Avangrid continue supporting employees’ financial security and health.
Since Avangrid was formed in 2015 by joining multiple utility companies together, its leaders have placed a concerted emphasis on creating a unified corporate culture, where employee well-being is a core tenet. Leveraging data for a more personalized approach to employee benefits is central to their strategy, as they continue to work alongside a cohort of companies dedicated to improving the financial health of workers nationwide.
And while Avangrid continues to invest in improved employee financial well-being, it has already taken substantial steps to drive its employees’ overall well-being, implementing initiatives that focus on work-life balance, career development, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
By joining the Worker Financial Wellness Initiative, Avangrid looks forward to building upon its investments in its workforce, which will underscore and build on solutions for customers and continue to create value for shareholders.
As Lagasse said at JUST’s Leadership Summit, he’s focused on investments that will build on the company’s success “not only tomorrow, but for the long term.”
March 6, 2024 — Avangrid, Inc. (NYSE: AGR), a leading sustainable energy company and member of the Iberdrola Group, is continuing to prioritize their employees’ financial security and health by joining The Worker Financial Wellness Initiative by JUST Capital and PayPal. The Initiative, established in collaboration with the Financial Health Network and Good Jobs Institute, offers resources to help companies assess and improve workers’ financial health.
“We want to be a company that attracts top talent to build long-term careers,” said Pedro Azagra, Avangrid CEO. “We do this by not only helping our employees grow professionally, but also supporting their well-being. The Worker Financial Wellness Initiative will cement us as a benefits leader and help us continue to enhance our programs and resources.”
The Worker Financial Wellness Initiative was launched in 2020 and engages directly with corporate leaders to promote the business value of financial health investment and empower them to perform worker financial health evaluations. Today, the initiative includes companies such as Chipotle, Chobani, Even, Prudential Financial, Synchrony, and Verizon, representing one million American workers. Since joining the initiative, participating companies have expanded and enhanced benefits, increased wages, created new ownership opportunities, and more.
Joining this initiative builds upon Avangrid’s commitment to caring for its people by providing diverse, equitable, and inclusive benefits that focus on their total health—physical, emotional, mental, and financial. This includes providing a leading 401(k) employer match, paid parental leave, comprehensive employee assistance program (EAP), and fertility and family forming benefits. Avangrid has also continued to expand its holistic benefits package by recently launching new programs such as a student loan debt repayment benefit, an emergency savings program, and mandatory financial training.
“Now is the right time to take our benefits to the next level by focusing on individual wellness,” said Kyra Patterson, chief human resources officer at Avangrid. “By leveraging data, we can take a more granular and personalized approach to the benefits we offer to take care of our employees. The Worker Financial Wellness Initiative will help us take this next step by leveraging research, tools, and a diverse network of subject matter experts dedicated to optimizing employee health and well-being outcomes.”
Tolu Lawrence, Chief Impact Officer at JUST Capital, an independent nonprofit dedicated to demonstrating how just business – defined by the priorities of the American public – is better business, noted that Avangrid’s participation in this insightful network of executives is monumental.
“Our polling of the nation’s public shows time and again that Americans of all backgrounds want CEOs to prioritize investing in workers,” said Lawrence. “And our research shows that companies that prioritize the well-being of their workers out-perform those that don’t. Avangrid is on a journey that will not only deeply impact the lives of its workers, but also has the potential to inform the trajectory of the energy industry at large. We look forward to welcoming them into the network and collaborating with our partners to drive impact with Avangrid and for its workers.”
Sarah Kalloch, executive director of The Good Jobs Institute echoed the sentiment, saying, “Research has shown how meaningful investment in employees can create productive, engaged, and motivated workforces that not only create better lives for workers, but also deliver real, sustained value for customers and shareholders. We are excited to support Avangrid on this journey.”
Media Contacts:
Sarah Warren, Avangrid
sarah.warren@avangrid.com
585-794-9253
Marguerite Ward, JUST Capital
mward@justcapital.com
Twice this week, JUST friend and Fortune Media CEO Alan Murray wrote about how challenging it is for CEOs to navigate today’s highly politicized world. JUST Board member Alan Fleischmann was quoted as saying “The CEO has to be able to articulate how he or she leads in this environment.” A hat tip to Alan, and to take it one step further: CEOs also need to be able to convincingly articulate how their strategy fits into their overall business strategy.
This is where our work comes in. Our Annual Rankings show which companies are making meaningful investments in their stakeholder leadership. And the platform we’ve created, as well as the stakeholder framework that underpins it – backed by 9 years of polling, 8 years of corporate performance data and over 1.3 million individual data points – cover many of the critical stakeholder issues that matter to CEOs today. It serves as a dynamic roadmap that can help any corporate leader navigate today’s political waters and take action on the things that matter most.
Throughout it all, the connection to financial performance remains pivotal. According to a piece released this week by Mona Patni, our quantitative financial analysis lead, “JUST Capital found that two of the five stakeholders we track delivered positive performance in Q4 2023. Over the longer term from January 2018 to December 2023, the leaders in corporate stakeholder performance across all five stakeholders have outperformed the laggards by 66.6% as measured by JUST Overall Score.”
With the pushback on ESG and ‘woke’ companies now maturing, we think there is room in America today for a more objective, data-driven framework that supports values-led business leadership, drives positive societal change and connects directly to business strategy. In other words, we think JUST’s time has come.
Be well,
Martin
“Media headlines about the creation and then elimination of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) positions at Big Tech companies have generated plenty of buzz. This kind of coverage can raise doubts about whether companies are committed to DEI in the long term. But these headlines aren’t telling the whole story […] In fact, our recent ‘Expanding Equity retrospective report’ suggests the opposite. Companies are doubling down on DEI as an essential part of their business strategy.”
CNBC Correspondent Sharon Epperson highlights our latest corporate data around diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in two on-air spots as part of the network’s ongoing coverage of the JUST Rankings.
On the podcast “Purpose 360,” hosted by business and nonprofit consultant and former Global Practice Chair of Edelman Business Carol Cone, JUST CEO Martin Whittaker explores JUST’s recently released 2024 Top 100 Rankings.
In his podcast, “The Mentor’s Radio,” JUST Capital Board Member Dan Hesse – former CEO of Sprint and current chairman of Akamai Technologies – discusses employee ownership and its contribution to economic justice and American competitiveness.
JUST Capital re-promotes its analysis on companies supporting diverse pipelines through investments in Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Separately, JUST Quantitative Research and Analytics Lead Mona Pati pens our latest review of quarterly stakeholder performance.
NVIDIA skyrocketed to a near $2 trillion-dollar market cap this week, riding the success of its expanding AI-focused chip production. Meanwhile, Google is working to fix its Gemini AI technology after it produced historically inaccurate images, which CEO Sundar Pichai has called “unacceptable.”
There’s pushback against the ESG pushback. This week Axios reports that a major climate advocacy group is launching a campaign to push back on the growing anti-ESG rhetoric, starting first in Arizona, which has become a hotbed of anti-ESG investing bills.
With companies fearing headlines about layoffs, more and more employers are turning to “quiet firing” – actively making employee jobs worse to encourage them to leave. Business Insider runs down the ways companies are trying to force employees out without having to explicitly lay them off in this recent piece.
It’s not just you – CNBC reports that Americans are spending the biggest share of their income on food in three decades due to grocery prices that just won’t fall. Data For Progress confirms that when voters say they are worried about the economy, their concern is almost entirely concentrated on the price of groceries. And while consumers wait for falling prices, many companies are actually fearing the drop.
Axios takes a close look at a major cybersecurity attack that affected the ability for millions of Americans to get their prescription medicine, revealing a major technology weakness in the healthcare industry that major companies are struggling to deal with.
Sony Playstation is laying off 8% of its workforce this week, joining a sweeping wave of layoffs affecting the video game industry. As of now, the first two months of 2024 have nearly matched the entirety of 2023 in layoffs.
This chart comes from our latest review of quarterly stakeholder performance. In Q4 2023, two of the five stakeholders we track delivered positive performance, and the Customers stakeholder delivered the strongest performance with a long-short spread of 3.01%. Dive deeper here.
