The JUST Report: Corporations Are Starting To Prioritize Worker Wealth Creation
Another week, another devastating hurricane. Since we covered how certain companies are stepping up to help those affected last week, this week I thought we’d switch gears and highlight some important worker matters.
The new Employment Rights Bill in the UK places employee benefits firmly on the agenda in that country and, if passed into law, will presumably affect many of the companies we cover that do business there. The bill covers a range of issues – including sick pay, parental and bereavement leave, protections for pregnant women and new mothers, flexible scheduling, and more – that are increasingly embraced by corporations ranked highly in our worker category. Could it be a portent of things to come in the U.S.? Hard to say, but these are subjects that routinely show up in our polling as being important to the public.
An element of this that enjoys almost universal support is employee financial well-being. Here, we’re starting to see a lot of leadership. NiSource, Oneok, and M&T Bank are but three examples of companies taking explicit action on wealth building for their staff. One specific option being leveraged (albeit gradually) by certain large employers – including Walgreens, Chipotle, Verizon, and Abbott Labs – is the student loan 401(k) matching program made possible by the Secure Act 2.0. This Act enables employers to support their talent pipeline by helping young workers pay down their student debt by making retirement plan contributions, even if the employees themselves are not making contributions on their own. According to the Forbes Edge report, roughly 300,000 of Walgreens’ employees are being offered the program, including over half of the firm’s pharmacists.
Finally, our upcoming Q3 investor performance report underscores why all this should matter to investors. Companies that lead in our workers stakeholder delivered strong performance over this period (with a long-short spread of 1.17%), and year-to-date our flagship JULCD index is beating its benchmark by 0.46% and the JUST 100 is hammering its bogey by 7.38%.
Be well,
Martin
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
(Walmart)
“The first thing on our mind was, how do we secure the health and well-being of all of our associates? How do we safeguard the well-being of our associates? And then I will also say: How do we safeguard the well-being of any customer or member that’s coming in?”
- Donna Morris, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Walmart, reflecting on how the company handled COVID in a New York Times interview highlighting how the company had stepped up in taking care of its employees in recent years.
Must Reads
The Washington Post reports that over a dozen states are suing TikTok, claiming that the app intentionally uses harmful, addictive features to hook young children onto the app.
McDonald’s is suing some of the America’s largest beef producers, claiming that companies like Tyson, JBS, and more colluded to fix prices, forcing companies to pay artificially high prices for meat. CNBC has the story.
NPR reveals that the U.S. had a stunningly high jobs report for the month of September. Examine the details here.
CNBC reports that the DOJ is considering breaking up Google as an antitrust remedy after they were found to be a monopoly.
Forbes examines the tangible benefits that good bosses to an organization and the productivity costs bad bosses incur on their companies.
The Deal looks at new research on executive ESG compensation to determine whether or not the fact that leadership nearly always hits ESG bonus goals is a product of focus or of setting easy hills to climb.
Bloomberg reports that Toyota is curbing its DEI policies after a coordinated social media campaign against the company.
Chart of the Week
This chart comes from a recent Gallup deep-dive on corporate AI use, and shows what kinds of tasks employees at different levels are using the technology for, revealing that managers are adopting it at a much higher rate than their counterparts.
