Investors across the aisle want employees to make political decisions, and slash some political spend

As the country moves full steam ahead toward the November midterm elections, some investors are looking closely at corporate voting policies.

Trillium Asset Management surveyed public companies’ policies on paid time off to vote and found that the majority of companies were only offering time off that aligned with state compliance.

And, it wasn’t just a philanthropic mission. “As we see now, the public wants the company to take a stance on every single issue that's coming out,” Hyewon Han, shareholder advocacy associate at Trillium Investment Management, told CFO Brew. Companies that put a little bit of extra effort into giving people time to voice their own opinions in the voting booth may be able to avoid spending time and resources on taking political stances.

Trillium has been successful in pushing corporations in its portfolio to rethink how they handle voting-day policies; in the past two years, the investor has gotten Bank of America, Apple, and PNC Bank to adopt new PTO-to-vote policies or strengthen their current policies, Han told CFO Brew.

The investors stand in good company with the public, where 88% of Americans report supporting companies offering employees PTO to vote on Election Day, according to the report.

And many ESG investors and anti-ESG investors have at least this one area in common: agreeing that businesses should focus on empowering employees or citizens instead of worrying about an official company position on given issues.

Could companies save money if they gave employees time to vote instead of funding political campaigns? Trillium, a Starbucks investor that has previously encouraged the company to “[engage] in good faith with workers to maintain positive labor relations,” seems to think so.

Despite investors on both sides of the political aisle agreeing on the matter, corporations’ efforts still remain “a patchwork,” according to the Trillium report. The largest grouping of companies received a “D” grade on Trillium’s scale, denoting that they only follow state compliance. The second-largest category was companies that gave less than four hours of PTO to vote, which landed them a “B” rating.

“Companies and businesses should honestly be acting on this,” Han said. “The environment isn’t supportive for citizens to just participate on their own. Companies end up having to make more and more statements.”

For its report, Han said Trillium focused primarily on corporations with shift workers, or those who work on an hourly schedule, given that despite the emergence of flexible and remote workplaces, manufacturing environments are often not afforded the same luxury. Claudia Toussaint, SVP and chief people and sustainability officer at Xylem, a water-technology provider, told CFO Brew that while it required some coordination, it was a “no-brainer” for that company to offer time off to vote for shift workers in democratic countries. —KT