In a rare instance of investors defying Apple Board of Directors’ proxy voting recommendations, AAPL shareholders approved an outside proposal requiring audits of the company’s civil-rights impact.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
The vote was part of Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, held virtually on Friday for the second year in a row. Investors also reelected the company’s board and approved its executive compensation plan.
The proposal on civil-rights audits is part of a broader push to get corporations to track if, and how, they contribute to racial inequities.
“Now it’s time for Apple to establish an honest third-party civil-rights audit of the company’s commitments to equality and fairness,” Dieter Waizenegger, executive director of the labor-backed firm SOC Investment Group, said in a statement after the meeting.
In opposing the measure, Apple argued that it already meets the objectives of the proposal. That includes conducting impact assessments and engaging with communities. The company described the audit recommended by the proposal as “broad and unfocused.”
“Civil rights is something we care deeply about and always have,” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said during the meeting.
MacDailyNews Take: You know, unless we’re talking about China.
Shareholders voted on 10 proposals, including four from Apple and six from outside investors. Investors followed the company’s recommendations on nine of them…
Cook and General Counsel Kate Adams took the form of Memoji images when they spoke at the meeting, relying on the virtual characters that Apple uses for iMessage and other services…
[Cook] vowed to continue increasing the annual dividend, which began in 2012, and said that employees will return to the office by April.
SOC Investment Group, which backed the proposal with the Service Employees International Union and Trillium Management, welcomed the approval and said it would help investors monitor whether Apple’s actions match its public relations.
“We’re going to take the company’s own metrics and say, ‘Okay, how do you live up to your own commitments?'” Dieter Waizenegger, executive director of SOC said. “Does your activity actually move the needle? Or is it just PR?”
Although the proposal is advisory, Waizenegger said, shareholders typically will hold the company’s board to account when something is passed with a majority of shareholder votes.
Apple said that it already meets the objectives of the proposal through its current policies, and a representative declined to comment.
MacDailyNews Note: The vote tallies for each proposal and BoD member are here.
The shareholder proposal entitled “Civil Rights Audit” was approved with 5,125,278,012 votes for vs. 4,445,469,491 votes against with 131,246,493 having abstained.
Apple’s 2022 Proxy Statement which includes the ten items of business and board voting recommendations is here.
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Now it seem that Apple is really doomed! It was not Microsoft, nor Samsung not even google, it was the damn leftist, vegans, feminazis communist who will take Apple down!!!!
Could be.. how did all those communist buy all of these shares I wonder? But solution is simple! Anti-communists unite and buy all the necessary shares to take over and reverse the decision!! DONE.
Actually, thats not the solution at all. Solution is leave the companies do what they do, not forcing them to become charity nouns to save the planet. Now it turn out that every successful company is forced to be santa claus.
“Equity,” …nothing but hypocritical BS. With Apple being questioned, “how do you live up to your own commitments,” will it encompass a critical & thorough look? Equity sounds so nice, but it reality, it ALWAYS brings two very negative implications….
1). Equity for one indi ALWAYS means another is losing a portion of “equity.”
2). To impose equity ALWAYS means someone else’s success is deemed unfair, w. privileged and often racist.
What follows ALWAYS includes a degradation of success and excellence…broadly. It’s the nature of “all for one–one for all.” Sounds cute, though, huh?
Maybe my definition of ‘equity’ differs. Accessibility functions on modern devices is a form of ‘equity’ allowing those that have one or more ‘challenges’ to use the device approaching the facility of the ‘normal’ user. Having those imposed settings/functions baked-in to the device does not detract nor degrade functionality from the fully able users and gives more value to the ‘challenged’.
I can get behind this form of “equity”. As someone who does as much as I can to make my products and service “accessible”, I get where you are coming from. However, I don’t think this is the “equity” that was being voted on unfortunately.
You’ve described a form of equal opportunity. Which is great, but what this political crap turns into is persecution of those whose thinking differs from the will of the loud. Remember when the Apple head of diversity, a black woman, made the egregious error of saying that diversity means diversity of mind, and if you have all races and genders but if everyone thinks the same, you don’t have diversity? THEY FIRED HER ASS THAT DAY.
This is nothing more than a long lost scene from the film “Idiocracy”- Edited out as “something so stupid, no one would ever believe humanity could sink this low”.