The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has long required public corporations to disclose the compensation of their top officers. The debate about whether chief executive officers are paid too much has gone on for decades. Many investors object to high CEO pay, which often runs into the tens of millions of dollars. Boards of directors…
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has long required that public companies post the annual compensation of their top executives in their proxies. In 2015, the SEC ruled that public corporations had to show how much their CEOs made in relationship with the median salary of their firm’s workers. The rule went into effect in…
S&P 1500 Employee Turnover Rate Disclosures After Regulation S-K Amendment Implementation
U.S. companies are sharing more details about employee turnover as part of new disclosure requirements. But for some investors, the effort doesn’t go far enough because finance chiefs handpick the information they provide. Workforce spending is usually the biggest expense for companies, making up on average 57% of total operating costs for S&P 500 companies,…
Boardrooms are abuzz about human capital. This is largely due to the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on the workforce, SEC updates to disclosure requirements, and a growing investor consortium prodding companies to get a handle on workforce strategy and related disclosures. Investors are asking for more details on emergency succession planning, workforce turnover and the talent pipeline as companies…
As the downturn has affected a growing number of companies, it has become plain that “no one is immune” from letting workers go, in the words of Richard Florida, who teaches economic policy at the University of Toronto. Yet as our most recent research shows, some companies are better inoculated than others from having to…
Boards should expect pressure from investors and regulators to disclose more information on workforce health and safety measures in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, experts say. Major investors say the current disclosures aren’t detailed enough, and a large group is pressuring the SEC to ramp up disclosure requirements on the effectiveness of companies’ human capital–related measures. The…
As bad as the pandemic job losses have been, with around 31 million Americans on unemployment rolls, it could actually have been worse. Some companies have managed to cut their labor costs to save money, without resorting to permanent layoffs — at least so far. In a recent survey of HR managers, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found…
When meat orders from restaurants, hotels and other food-service clients dried up at two of Hormel Foods Corp.’s plants in April, finance chief Jim Sheehan chose to furlough roughly 350 workers, but didn’t lay them off. These furloughed employees didn’t receive pay but got benefits such as health care. It was a careful calculus. After years of effort…
Investors are pushing companies to address things like hazard pay and whether temporary policies and practices related to employees need to stay in place as businesses transition out of the depth of the pandemic. Yesterday, New York City comptroller Scott Stringer sent a letter to the Amazon board’s leadership development and compensation committee asking chair Judith McGrath to address at its upcoming annual…