ESG Focus Areas
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Our Engagements on CHRB assessments Since 2017 NAM has been involved in a collaborative engagement targeting companies that score zero on human rights due diligence in the CHRB assessments. The collaborative engagement is coordinated by the Investor Alliance on Human Rights. The CHRB assessments and company scoring have also been used in our on-going engagements with some very large companies on human rights and workers’ rights. Please find below some examples of engagement cases: Starbucks: One successful example is Starbucks. The company has been involved in various labour disputes with staff in the US and the company’s commitments on freedom of association and collective bargaining. We have had several meet- ings with the company and have used our voting power to support shareholder proposals asking for improved disclosure and performance in regard to worker’s rights and vote against directors. In 2024 Starbucks finally came to an agreement with the unions to begin the discussions on a framework designed to achieve collective bargaining agreements and fair processes for union organizing. While the process is still ongoing, the company tells us they stay committed. Three other examples of ongoing engagements on human and worker’s rights are Amazon, Alphabet and Tesla. As these companies are progressing slowly, we escalated our engagement efforts in 2025: Amazon: In 2025 we continued to escalate our Amazon engagement by refiling our shareholder proposal for an indepen- dent FOACB assessment—later excluded via SEC no-action—and opening structured dialogue with board committees. We co-signed an investor letter on the planned Quebec site closures, voted against the CEO at the AGM, and supported an independent AI human-rights audit proposal. Beyond labour rights, we broadened into digital rights by co-leading the Ranking Digital Rights engagement and requesting an HRIA for Amazon.com; engagement is ongoing. Alphabet: At Alphabet (Google) we co-signed an investor letter for Alphabet’s board asking the board to act on a share- holder proposal that we supported last year. The proposal asked the board to publish an independent third-party Human Rights Impact Assessment (“HRIA”) to examine the actual and potential human rights impacts of Google’s AI-driven tar- geted advertising policies and practices. Tesla, Inc.: In 2025, we escalated our Tesla engagement beyond the 2024 actions by co-filing a labour-rights shareholder proposal for the 2025 AGM (subsequently omitted via SEC no-action); shifting to sustained management-level dialogue by maintaining regular outreach to independent directors, meeting directly with Tesla’s CFO, General Counsel and IR and stepping up pre-AGM engagement through multiple investor webinars and forums. We also exercised our voting rights to oppose the proposed ~USD 1 trillion CEO pay package and several management items while supporting shareholder-rights proposals; our governance and human-rights engagement remain ongoing. Another issue we have addressed in our engagement with Tesla was their responsibility for sourcing cobalt. Key to the electric vehicle technology is the battery, containing a number of different minerals, including cobalt. To improve our understanding of industrial mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we commissioned a field study from UK based RAID (Rights and Accountability in Development). The research was published in 2021: The Road to Ruin? Electric vehicles and workers’ rights abuses at DR Congo’s industrial cobalt mines. We have shared and discussed the report with Tesla.
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