NY Pension Calls on Firms to Report Abuse, Harassment, Discrimination

The New York State Common Retirement Fund has filed shareholder proposals with portfolio companies Tesla, Starbucks, and Activision Blizzard, asking them to report how they are working to prevent abuse, sexual harassment, and racial discrimination in the workplace, while calling each one out on recent examples of alleged illegal or improper behavior.

The pension fund’s proposals for each company are similar in language, as they each request the companies publish an annual report that describes and quantifies their efforts to “prevent harassment and discrimination against protected classes of employees,” including sexual harassment and racial discrimination. However, in its proposal for Activision Blizzard the fund also added the word “abuse.”

The proposals cited specific concerns the pension fund has with each company. For example, its Activision Blizzard proposal mentioned an investigation into the video game company by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which it said resulted in a lawsuit alleging discrimination, retaliation, and unequal pay. It said the Fair Employment and Housing Department estimates the firm’s total liability to be more than $930.3 million to 2,500 allegedly injured employees.

“For years, there have been alarming news reports that detail allegedly rampant sexual abuse, discrimination, harassment, and retaliation directed toward female employees,” the proposal said.

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In the pension fund’s proposal with Tesla, it noted that there have been “numerous news reports and allegations of gender and race discrimination, harassment and retaliation” at the electric vehicle maker. It cited a $137 million jury verdict in October, including $130 million in punitive damages, against Tesla for its “racially hostile” work environment.

“It has been reported that most Tesla workers are currently bound by mandatory arbitration agreements,” the proposal said, “so, consequently, there is little transparency into the extent of workforce mismanagement.”

And in its proposal to Starbucks, the pension fund cited “recently resolved allegations” made by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concerning alleged racial bias in the promotion of its employees.

“There have also been multiple media reports of allegations and lawsuits claiming that the company failed to protect employees from discrimination and harassment,” the proposal said.

The proposals ask the companies to disclose:

The total number and aggregate dollar amount of disputes settled by the company related to sexual abuse or harassment or discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, gender identity, or sexual orientation; and
The average length of time it takes to resolve harassment complaints, and the total number of pending harassment or discrimination complaints the company is trying to resolve internally or through litigation.

“No one should be subjected to sexual harassment, racial discrimination or bias in the workplace,” New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said in a statement. “When companies turn a blind eye to abuse by their executives, managers, employees, and customers, they perpetuate the harm and put investors at risk. These three companies have all had sexual harassment or racial discrimination controversies, and we are seeking a full accounting of what they are doing to stop these abhorrent behaviors and what it’s costing the companies.”

In addition to the shareholder proposals, DiNapoli, who is also the trustee of the $279.7 billion state pension fund, has asked streaming music service Spotify for details about the effectiveness of its new content rules, citing complaints about controversial podcast host Joe Rogan, according to Reuters.

DiNapoli, who oversees funds that own shares of Spotify owner Spotify Technology, sent a letter sent to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, citing complaints about Rogan spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, according to Reuters. The letter also called on Spotify to give users an easy way to report content that is in potential violation of its rules, and to define how its board oversees content risks and enforcement.

DiNapoli also mentioned reports of other COVID-19 misinformation, as well as racist and antisemitic material in Spotify-hosted content.

“As we have seen with other technology and media companies that host or publish content, the failure to successfully moderate content on a company’s platforms can lead to various reputational, regulatory, legal, and financial risks,” DiNapoli wrote, according to Reuters.

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Tags: Activision Blizzard, Joe Rogan, New York State Common Retirement Fund (NYCRF), racial discrimination, Sexual Harassment, shareholder proposals, Spotify, Starbucks, Tesla, Thomas P. DiNapoli

Celebrated disruption-tech devotee Cathie Wood has several distinctions, but one stands out: An exchange-traded fund has been hatched to short her own flagship ETF, Ark Innovation. So she is trashing this upstart.

“The idea of shorting innovation, in America, is ridiculous, I think,” the founder of investment firm Ark Invest told CNBC. The doppelganger fund, Tuttle Capital Short Innovation, is short-sighted and short-term obsessed, she charged.

Wood said, “When I see people so sure that we are wrong that they are willing… to set up funds to short innovation, you know that investor psychology, the pendulum, has swung so far in one direction, that if we’re right… the rewards are going to be enormous,”

Her celebrated flagship fund had superb returns through 2020, when it gained 156%, but it lost 23% in 2021 and is down 28% so far this year. Founded in November, the Tuttle ETF, though, is up 30% year to date.

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The Tuttle fund trades under the ticker SARK, an obvious mocking reference to Wood’s Ark firm. CEO Matthew Tuttle, who started his investment firm in 2012, told the business TV network last fall that he viewed his shadow-Wood fund as “a great hedge” against when markets slide. Because it focuses on the “high-multiple names,” like the ones in Wood’s ETF, his portfolio stands to do better, in his view. The Wood-style stocks, he said, “will be hurt more” in a downturn than other stocks.

His ETF, composed entirely of shorts, lists $319 million in assets, while Wood’s ETF has $12.6 billion. To Wood, regardless of present market conditions, her strategy of owning shares in the game-changing tech will pay off big-time later.

In her appearance, Wood defended her holdings, singling out video conferencing company Zoom Video Communications (down 30% this year) and online gaming platform Roblox (off 48% for the same period). Both have big futures and their current slump is merely temporary, she argued.

“We are now in the first rip-and-replace cycle since the early ’90s, when the internet was evolving, in the enterprise communications space,” she said. Companies like Zoom “are in the process of helping companies and individuals transform their lives and rearrange their communications stack, this time in the cloud,” she added.

Roblox really got hammered this week after reporting disappointing financial results, coming in with less revenue and a deeper loss than analysts had projected. Wood said she spent more than $20 million buying more of the stock as it fell.

Overall, she added, Roblox is “one of the best ways to play the global metaverse out there. We saw the stock hit very hard by some short-term numbers. We were impressed by the daily average user growth at 33%.”