Newground Social Investment won a first-of-its-kind vote at Plum Creek Timber, the nation’s largest private landholder. Their resolution, which got an 18% FOR vote asked the company to change its vote-counting practices. Plum Creek agreed to revise its vote-counting formula to remove Broker Non-Votes. The resolved portion of their resolution read as follows: RESOLVED: The shareholders of Plum […]
Tag Archives | proxy voting
How I Voted at Goldman Sachs & 3M
At Goldman Sachs I voted down the line with AFSCME, with the help of ProxyDemocracy.org: withholding my vote from four directors, voting against the auditor and voting for all the shareowner resolutions, except one. You might think from its title that “Report on Global Warming Science” would be a something positive. It is not. Unfortunately, […]
How I Voted at Winmark, Rovi, Under Armour, Fluor and Waste Connections
Busy week coming, so I used ProxyDemocracy.org on Sunday mostly to research how my favorite “brands” voted and MoxyVote.com to vote. Here are the results: Winmark – I got no voting advice from my usual sources, so voted with management’s recommendations. Rovi – I voted with the recommendations of Florida SBA and management’s recommendations. Under […]
Reform Indian Corporate Governance Practices
Shubi Arora begins a three part report on the Asian Corporate Governance Association (ACGA) White Paper on Corporate Governance in India. The need for improvement in Indian Corporate Governance Practices: Part I, 4/12/2010. It concluded that while India has enacted numerous reforms in corporate governance, especially in the area of company boards, independent directors, and […]
Proxy Preview 2010
Proxy Preview is an annual publication that focuses on upcoming social and environmental shareholder proposals. However, it also includes some information on governance proposals as well. It was initiated to help foundations and endowments better align investment and mission but it is useful for other organizations or individual shareholders. The Proxy Preview is published by […]
AFL-CIO Key Votes
Since 1997, the AFL-CIO’s Key Votes Survey has helped pension fund trustees fulfill their fiduciary obligations to monitor their investment managers’ proxy voting performance. The proposals included in the Key Votes Survey are submitted by a variety of union-sponsored and public pension funds, employee shareholders and other investors and are consistent with the AFL-CIO Proxy […]
0.3% of Directorships Voted Down in 2009: Will 2010 Be Different?
The Corporate Library announced a new enhancement to its Board Analyst® product: the ability to visually flag specific areas of potential concern for individual directors. (‘Director Flags’ Zero In On Potential Areas of Concern for Individual Board Members, The Corporate Library Blog, 3/8/10) With the end of “broker voting” for directors and the adoption by […]
Canadian Pensions Fail to Provide Proxy Voting Direction
The Shareholder Association for Research and Education’s (SHARE) ninth annual Key Proxy Vote Survey found that a substantial proportion of investment managers (71%) say they vote most of their pension fund clients’ proxies at their own discretion, without instructions or guidance from their clients. “We saw a 10% decrease this year in the number of […]
Vote Disclosure Coming at Pension Funds
At a hearing on compensation in the financial services industry, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said, “If you are the owner of shares … you have a privacy right, but if you own shares on behalf of a fiduciary you will need to disclose how you vote.” In late 2003, after years of […]
Major Shift in Proxy Voting Policy at State Street
Last year Walden Asset Management filed a resolution at State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) seeking a proxy review. While SSgA successfully obtained a “no-action” letter from the SEC, their voting practices were still the subject of a debate at the annual meeting. This year United for a Fair Economy picked up the torch and filed […]
Fiduciary Responsibilities for Proxy Voting
O’Barr, Conley and Brancato trace the common thread in the culture of pension funds in their book, Fortune and Folly: The Wealth and Power of Institutional Investing, to “an overriding concern with managing personal relationships” and an all pervasive “need to manage responsibility and blame.” Involvement by fund trustees in corporate governance issues is not yet the […]