Committee on Workers' Capital

Shared Prosperity: The Investor Case for Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining

Tamara Herman — 2022-11-29T15:59:00Z

This brief explains why respect for the fundamental labour rights of collective bargaining and freedom of association is important to investors.

For information on the PRI in Person Side event, click here.

When workers come together in a trade union, they can effect meaningful changes in their compensation and working conditions, bringing valuable benefits to themselves and their companies and contributing to broader societal goals of economic growth, income and wealth equality, equity and inclusion. As these benefits and contributions are of interest to investors, this brief outlines how they can meet their responsibilities to protect workers' fundamental labour rights.

Read the full report here

cwc_foa_cb_report.pdf

Read the Executive Summary here

cwc_foa_cb_report_executive_summary.pdf

Reporting on Labour Rights at Amazon.com: Expectations from the Committee on Workers' Capital

Tamara Herman — 2022-04-11T15:23:07Z

The CWC appreciates that Amazon.com, Inc. (“Amazon”) is planning to report on how it implements its commitments to freedom of association and collective bargaining.

Since Amazon has not yet outlined just what it will include in its report, and, given our concerns regarding Amazon's record on labour rights, we have articulated a set of expectations – in the form of questions – that, if fully and honestly answered, would render this report meaningful and useful for investors.

cwc_amazon_proxy_season_guidelines_foa_v2.pdf

Amazon AGM Investor Briefing: Workers' Rights & Opportunities at Amazon

Tamara Herman — 2022-04-05T22:07:19Z

The Global Unions' Committee on Workers Capital and the SOC Investment Group cordially invite you:

Amazon AGM Investor Briefing: Workers' Rights & Opportunities at Amazon

April 27| 10:30 am - 11:45 am EDT

Is Amazon fulfilling its promise to be the “Earth's Best Employer” and the “Earth's Safest Place to Work”? How Amazon, one of the largest global employers, answers these challenges will be critical for the company's long-term success.

Leading up to this year's annual meeting on May 25, speakers with diverse and unique expertise, including Amazon workers, a labor relations expert, and a shareholder advocate will explore these questions and address key items on Amazon's proxy ballot. The panelists will share their knowledge and first-hand experience with Amazon's operations and corporate governance to give investors useful tools to assess Amazon's progress towards its workplace goals. Webinar attendees will receive actionable information for the evaluation of risks and opportunities at Amazon and for engagement with Amazon's board and management.

Panelists:

An Amazon US worker
An Amazon Europe worker
John Logan, Professor, Labor & Employment Studies, SF State University
Sarah Couturier-Tanoh, Manager Corporate Engagement and Shareholder Advocacy, Shareholder Association for Research & Education
Brad Lander, New York City Comptroller

Moderator: Sharon Hendricks, Vice-Chair, California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS)

Backgrounders:

Reporting on Labour Rights at Amazon.com: Expectations from the Committee on Workers' Capital (2022)

The Injury Machine: How Amazon's Production System Hurts Workers - Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) (2022)

CWC Statement for Investors on the Union Election at Amazon's Facility in Bessemer, Alabama (2021)

Amazon In-Depth: Work, Rights and Risks at Amazon.com, Inc. (2020)

Investor Brief: Amazon.com, Inc. and the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020)

CWC Statement for Investors on the Union Election at Amazon's Facility in Bessemer, Alabama

Hugues Letourneau — 2021-04-15T10:00:00Z

On April 15th, 2021, the Global Unions' Committee on Workers' Capital issued a statement that describes how Amazon's anti-union campaign at its Bessemer, Alabama facility interfered with its workers' internationally recognized rights to freedom of association.

The statement lays out the steps that investors can take to engage with Amazon on the gap between its policies and recent practices in Bessemer, Alabama.

Read the CWC Statement by clicking below.

Other CWC resources on Amazon (including the CWC investor brief on Amazon) are available here.

cwc_amazon_statement-2021-04-16.pdf

Amazon In-Depth: Work, Rights and Risks at Amazon.com, Inc.

Tamara Herman — 2020-07-07T19:18:31Z

Amid Amazon.com Inc.'s (“Amazon”) rapid growth, worrying patterns with respect to employee health and safety, infringement of international labour standards, and aversion to collective bargaining have emerged. This investor report provides an overview of Amazon and describes workforce risks in its operations.

Workforce risks documented in Amazon In-Depth include:

Health and safety: Facing demanding productivity quotas in warehouses, studies in various jurisdictions document that workers suffer from higher-than-average injury rates.

Workers' rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining: With strikes and work stoppages at logistics centres across Europe and North America, Amazon has faced pressure to recognize workers' rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining. In some cases, workers allege that they were fired for attempting to improve their working conditions.

COVID-19: Amazon's response to COVID-19 has further illuminated precarious working conditions, as well as health and safety issues, in the company's warehouse and delivery chain.

Workers' collective voice is essential to improving Amazon's workforce management and mitigating the human rights risks that may negatively impact the company's reputation.

This report provides a path for investors to address these risks by encouraging improvements in Amazon's workforce management practices. Specifically, we suggest that investors should request from Amazon a commitment to strengthen its performance and reduce its human rights risks by:

GOVERNANCE: Elevating workforce management oversight to the board of directors, appointing directors with specific human resource management and human rights due diligence skills and experience, and publicly disclosing the board's workforce oversight policies and activities.

RISK MANAGEMENT: Improving its existing labour and human rights policies (the “Amazon Global Human Rights Principles”) to manage risk more effectively by:

Specifying the business relationships – such as customers, suppliers, employees – to whom the company's commitments apply, as well as how the company will embed its policy commitments and strengthen accountability;

Committing to implement among its direct employees and those in its value chain the full range of labour rights specified in the Core Conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO), including the right to collective bargaining;

Working with investors and independent human rights experts to detail the processes it will use to identify, assess, prevent, mitigate, and, where appropriate, address adverse human and labour rights impacts, in accordance with the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and other relevant standards.

Fulfilling its pledge to lead in workforce management by committing to upholding international human and labour rights standards, even where national law – including in the United States, where its largest workforce is located – does not meet those standards.

Read Amazon In-Depth by clicking here

cwc_amazon_in_depth_investor_brief-06-20-eng_final.pdf

Photo: Shutterstock | Frederic Legrand - COMEO

Investor Brief: Grupo México

Tamara Herman — 2020-06-29T23:25:20Z

This investor brief summarizes environmental, social, and governance risks at Grupo México, the third largest copper mining company in the world. Grupo México's wholly-owned subsidiary ASARCO operates copper mines, a smelter, a refinery and processing plants in the United States.

Approximately 1,700 workers in Arizona and Texas walked off the job in October 2019 to protest the company's unfair labor practices after management demanded significant increases to healthcare costs and refused to raise wages, which would remain stagnant for 14 years under the company's contract proposal. The strike has gained investor attention and crippled the company's Hayden smelter and Amarillo refinery operations.

Read our investor brief on ESG risks at Grupo México here.

Investor Brief: Amazon.com, Inc. and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Tamara Herman — 2020-04-27T03:46:25Z

Amazon's explosive growth has accelerated as a result of COVID-19 public health restrictions, creating new stress on the company's operations. The company faces challenges in keeping its workforce, its customers, and the communities it serves safe - challenges that are amplified under increased public and investor scrutiny. How Amazon responds to the public health crisis will have a lasting impact on Amazon's corporate reputation and its relationship with its workforce.

This investor brief summarizes workforce risks at Amazon in Europe and the United States. It includes a set of policies and practices, developed in consultation with occupational and public health experts, that assist companies in protecting their workers, customers and the communities they serve. These policies and practices are widely applicable and available as a separate document here.

To read the Amazon investor brief, click here.

To read Workforce Best Practices for COVID-19, click here

Please note that the documents were revised on May 4, 2020.

Image: “Amazon – official opening,” Scottish Government (Photographer Chris Watt), Photo taken on November 14, 2011. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0). Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/scottishgovernment/6352123585/.

Workforce Best Practices for COVID-19

Tamara Herman — 2020-04-26T04:32:00Z

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an urgent need for companies to adopt best practices to protect their workers, their customers and the communities they serve.
We encourage companies to adopt a set of recommended policies and practices that were developed in consultation with occupational and public health experts.
Click here to read the document.
(Note: This is a revised version of the previous document. Published Monday, May 4, 2020)
Photo: (...)

- Investor Briefs / Shareholder Activism Working Group, Company Engagement, Worker Rights and Labour Standards, News , Briefs, Implementation Guides

Labour risks at Amazon's operations in Spain

Tamara Herman — 2020-04-22T06:20:50Z

An update on Amazon's operations in Spain by Mario Sanchez Richter, Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CS CCOO).

After several people developed symptoms in Amazon centers, management unilaterally implemented a protocol for prevention and action in response to the pandemic. The response was insufficient and did not lay out an effective method of implementation.

At the time, Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), communicated to Amazon management that the measures in various work centers were insufficient to protect the health of the workforce. For example, the minimum social distances for safety were not even respected.

It should be noted that companies that work in the distribution and delivery of products purchased in electronic commerce are considered essential, and a Royal Decree obliges them to maintain the service.

In Spain there are currently approximately 25 Amazon distribution centers, and yet only six benefit from workers' representatives. The CCOO union is only present in 5 of these centers. The Amazon distribution centers with union representation include both large work centers (around 1500 workers or more) and small centers (with less than 300 workers). In centers where there is no workers' representation, it is difficult to obtain information and assess the situation during the pandemic.

After the company made few improvements, CCOO filed a request with the Labour Inspectorate (Inspección de Trabajo y Seguridad Social) to review Amazon's health and safety response to the pandemic at several distribution centers.

In the smaller work centers, addressing safety issues did not present as many challenges as in the larger centers. For example, a center in San Fernando de Henares, the Labour Inspectorate was forced to pursue a difficult path that included, over several weeks, multiple extraordinary meetings, informal meetings, evaluation reports and counter-responses filed by the company. The Labour Inspectorate's visit to the facilities resulted in – after a great effort on the part of workers' legal representatives carried out by the CCOO unit – the application of more than 100 direct safety measures. It also resulted in the creation of a Work Commission, composed of company and union representatives, whose purpose is to evaluate and monitor the measures taken for the protection of the health of the workforce against COVID-19. Since the COVID-19 Commission was launched, more than 140 health and safety issues have been detected. New measures continue to be developed.

In the two months since the outbreak began, eight workers of 200 have tested positive for COVID 19 and completed their quarantines in the distribution centers with workers' representation. This data cannot be completed for the 18 centers without union representation.

Photo: Álvaro Ibáñez from Madrid, Spain / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

Webinar on Work, Rights, and Risks at Amazon

Tamara Herman — 2019-12-13T22:38:46Z

The Committee on Workers Capital and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility organized a joint webinar on Thursday, January 23rd, 2020. The webinar recording is now available at this link.

Amazon has grown rapidly to become the third-largest private employer in the world, with 750,000 workers, not including tens of thousands of temporary employees, so-called independent Flex drivers, and employees at logistics subcontractors. This growth has created challenges for the company, including abuses of workers' rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining, risks to workers' safety and health, allegations of mistreatment of women workers and workers of color, as well as concerns about environmental and social impacts on the communities where it operates. For Amazon investors, these human capital management challenges represent risks to the long-term value generation of the company.

To better understand those risks, you will hear from Spencer Cox, Adjunct Professor, University of Minnesota, USA, an expert who has both studied and worked at the company, an Amazon worker, and Fredric Nystrom, Head of Responsible Investment at Öhman Group, Sweden, an investor who has engaged the company regarding its labor rights policies and practices.

This webinar is jointly organized by the Committee on Workers Capital and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.

Click here to register

Photo: Flickr | Fibonacci Blue