The 2022 Top 100 U.S. Companies Supporting Healthy Families and Communities

Communities and families across the United States have faced unprecedented challenges to their physical, financial, and social well-being over the past year. From the ongoing pandemic to climate-related disasters to persistent racial injustices, all against the backdrop of continuously rising inflation and declining real wages, Americans’ health and well-being has been at risk in new and compounding ways. As these threats have intensified, so too have expectations from workers, investors, customers, and other stakeholders for corporate America to take action.

To identify how U.S. companies have supported the health of workers, their families, and their communities, we compiled a 2022 list of the Top 100 U.S. Companies Supporting Healthy Communities and Families. JUST originally produced the thematic ranking in 2019 and 2021 with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is focused on building a national Culture of Health where everyone has a fair and just opportunity at health and well-being.

This year, we updated the list by evaluating the performance of Russell 1000 companies on 10 key issues from our 2022 Rankings, from providing fair wages and adequate benefits to contributing to local communities’ development to combating climate change and reducing pollution to protecting families’ health and safety.

Our analysis uses a comprehensive approach to understand how a company prioritizes health and well-being at the intersection of our five key stakeholders – Workers, Customers, Communities, the Environment, and Shareholders/Governance. This approach enables us to capture performance on issues such as environmental justice, community engagement, worker financial wellness, and health equity.

The companies on the list are dedicated to holistically addressing stakeholder well-being in the following areas: environmental justice; community engagement; workers’ wages, and benefits; diversity, equity, and inclusion; product safety; and ESG governance.

Environmental justice is a cornerstone of a company’s contributions to healthy families and communities, as it pertains to the treatment of individuals and communities disproportionately burdened by adverse environmental impacts from corporate practices. We found that:

• 46% of the Top 100 have committed to reaching Net-Zero by 2050, compared to only 6% of the rest of the Russell 1000.
• Of this 46%, 29% have a verified Science-Based target to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, compared to 4% of Russell 1000 peers.
• The Top 100 emit 1.5 times less NOx gasses than other companies in the Russell 1000.

It is also critical to engage with and support the communities who are impacted by these harms, so we assessed community engagement practices, supplier diversity, and amount of corporate giving. Our analysis showed that the Top 100, on average, are:

• Nearly five times more likely to disclose topics or issue areas raised by consulting with the community than the remaining universe (30% vs. 6.09%).
• Nearly four times more likely to disclose structural mechanisms and practices through which they engage with the community (66% vs. 16.74%).

Policies and practices that center workers’ well-being are essential to building healthy families and communities. We looked at data covering workers’ wages, benefits, and health and safety; and action on diversity, equity, and opportunity. Our analysis found that:

• 71% of the companies in the Top 100 disclose that they conduct a general pay gap analysis, and 57% conduct a race/ethnicity pay gap analysis (compared to the rest of the Russell 1000 at 16% and 9.6%, respectively).
• 52% of the Top 100 companies have set quantifiable, time-bound employee demographic targets to hold themselves accountable in promoting diversity and opportunity, compared to only 14.6% of the rest of the Russell 1000.
• The Top 100 offer, on average, 2.7 more weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers and 3.4 more weeks of paid parental leave for secondary caregivers than their Russell 1000 peers.
• The Top 100 are 1.7 times more likely to disclose their total recordable incident rates compared to other Russell 1000 companies.

In addition to worker financial wellness and environmental justice, we also analyzed companies’ degree of commitment to their overall ESG targets and product safety, measuring the latter through fines related to product safety. Organizing at a board level to discuss ESG issues, as they pertain to stakeholder health, holds companies accountable to reaching their targets and provides different stakeholders with assurance that these promises are intentional and are tracked systematically. We found that:

• None of the Top 100 companies received any fines related to the safety of their products, whereas the rest of the Russell 1000 averaged about $13,800 in product safety fines.
• The top 100 companies, on average, were 2.5 times more likely to disclose a formal schedule that instructs the board to meet more than annually about ESG matters (63% vs. 25.3%)
• 39% of the top 100 were also more likely to disclose a clear linkage between compensation and meeting ESG KPIs, compared to only 11% of the rest of the universe.

Explore which companies are leading on these issues below.

Methodology

This Ranking utilizes data from JUST Capital’s 2022 Rankings of America’s Most JUST Companies. Of the 20 issues in our Rankings model, we identified the 10 issues that best “define how companies invest in the health and well-being of their workers, the families they support, and the communities in which they operate.” The issues are:

• Pays a fair, living wage.
• Prioritizes accountability to all stakeholders.
• Protects worker health and safety.
• Provides benefits and work-life balance.
• Contributes to community development.
• Gives back to local communities.
• Makes beneficial products.
• Cultivates a diverse, inclusive workplace.
• Minimizes pollution.
• Helps combat climate change.

For more details on the underlying data used in this ranking, please see JUST Capital’s full Rankings methodology.

Notes: We previously put Uber “under review” in our 2022 Rankings of America’s Most JUST Companies. The company remains in our Rankings and is flagged as such due to inconsistent workforce data and disclosures (please see this post for more background). As our 2022 Top 100 U.S. Companies for Healthy Families and Communities uses the same methodology as our 2022 Rankings, Uber ranks 61st on this list. We’ve withheld a JUST Seal that denotes its inclusion as one of America’s Most JUST Companies, despite being ranked in the JUST 100, here as well. 

PayPal is a financial supporter of JUST Capital’s programmatic work with the goal of inspiring more companies to make worker financial health and security a C-suite priority. This work is separate and discrete from JUST Capital’s overall Ranking Methodology and has no impact or influence on their scores in this thematic ranking.