ESGMarch 19, 2024

NYC Comptroller Says Apple’s Workers' Rights Assessment Lacks Credibility.

Brad Lander said a report by law firm Jenner & Block lacks rigor, expertise and worker input.

Reported by Michael Katz

A group of institutional investors led by New York City’s five pension funds has released a report that is highly critical of a workers’ rights assessment of tech giant Apple Inc. conducted by law firm Jenner & Block LLP.

The investor group, which also includes U.K.-based Greater Manchester Pension Fund, Parnassus Investments, Service Employees International Union Master Trust Pension Plan, SOC Investment Group and Trillium Asset Management, said the assessment lacks rigor, expertise, worker input and credibility.

“Apple’s lackluster report undermines confidence in the company’s commitment to workers’ rights,” NYC Comptroller Brad Lander said in a statement. “As the company addresses many major real-world issues, it is disappointing that it is not equally focused on respecting the fundamental rights of its workers to freedom of association and collective bargaining.”

New York City’s five pension funds collectively owned more than $3.7 billion worth of Apple shares, as of January 31.

Spurred by media reports and regulatory filings that the investors said suggested possible Apple interference with workers’ rights, the group submitted a shareholder proposal in 2022 that called for Apple to commission an independent assessment to determine if it was adhering to its stated commitment to workers’ freedom of association and collective bargaining rights. The group dropped its proposal after Apple agreed in early 2023 to conduct the assessment and publish the findings by the end of the year.

However, according to the investors, their recommendations to ensure a genuine assessment went unheeded by Apple’s board of directors, and that the assessment raised three main concerns: It failed to address the company’s actual practices, it lacked “crucial worker input” and the assessor lacked relevant expertise.

The investor group’s report said Jenner & Block’s assessment was a largely superficial “desktop” review of Apple’s policies and training programs that received no input from a representative sample of internal stakeholders or from workers seeking to exercise their organizing rights. It also said the assessor, Keith Harper, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council, lacked relevant international labor rights expertise, which led to “inaccurate assertions concerning international labor standards that call into question the report’s conclusions and recommendations.”

The investors said that while the assessment extensively detailed Apple’s policies and manager training, it did not examine whether these were implemented successfully.

“Jenner & Block did not examine issues raised in 28 unfair labor practice charges, which reflect relevant worker input and may have indicated areas of company practice that were potentially inconsistent with Apple’s stated commitments,” the investors’ analysis charged. “The assessor failed to perform any examination of the efficacy of the training programs it describes, including the subsequent understanding or actions of managers that received training.”

The investors also said the assessment did not examine whether Apple’s response to labor activity was part of a broader strategy to avoid unionization and did not address the company’s reported hiring of the law firm Littler Mendelson PC, which they said is “widely known to assist companies in ‘union avoidance’ strategies.”

Representatives for Jenner & Block did not immediately respond to a request for comment.