In the Bloomberg clip above, Eli Kasargod-Staub, co-founder of the leading nonprofit shareholder advocacy organization Majority Action, breaks it down:
“Particularly around worker safety, we’re unfortunately seeing a level pushback from a couple of corporate boards that have really been resisting shareholder efforts to engage and get better disclosures around how those companies are managing worker safety and workplace-related risks…
We’re seeing it at Wendy’s, where the company has refused to disclose information about how they oversee human rights risks in their supply chain, even after 95% of their shareholders voted in favor of a proposal for that last year. So we are seeing shareholders start to step out and say, ‘Hey, it might now be time to hold these boards accountable.’"
On Monday, the campaign was prominently featured in the widely circulated “Moral Money” column of the Financial Times and excerpted here:
Food fight: Wendy’s, Nelson Peltz face fire on pigs and tomatoes
A fight over food companies’ welfare practices — for those with two legs and four — has engulfed billionaire activist investors Nelson Peltz and Carl Icahn. The outcome will be determined by shareholders in the days ahead.
Following a shareholder vote at Wendy’s last year pressuring the company to disclose more information about the tomato farmers it contracts and the potential for human slavery, New York City pension funds have said they will vote against Peltz as the company’s chair at its annual meeting on Wednesday.
The board has “failed to adequately respond to a majority-supported shareholder proposal filed in 2021 concerning worker protections in the food supply chain,” New York City comptroller Brad Lander said in a statement to Moral Money.
The Wendy’s 2021 petition won 95 per cent of shareholder support, and the company did report more information later in the year. But farmworker advocates wanted Wendy’s to go further, prompting a campaign to vote against Peltz, the head of asset manager Trian Partners.
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The outcome of this week’s vote at Wendy’s will give a sign of how seriously other investors are taking these issues.
The Financial Times also noted the critical boost that the campaign received when Glass Lewis—a leading proxy vote advisor service, which makes influential recommendations on how shareholders should vote in corporate board elections—issued its own recommendation that shareholders vote NO on Nelson Peltz for Wendy’s Board Chair.
Later this week, we’ll be sharing a photo and video recap of our major “Vote No” action outside Trian Partners’ New York City office. Stay tuned to your email for that and all the latest developments leading up to the vote!
