April 7, 2021
Say-on-Pay: CalPERS’ Eye-Popping Trend Line
– Liz Dunshee
CalPERS’ recently presented this “Proxy Voting & Corporate Engagements Update” to its Investment Committee. Page 5 contains an eye-popping trend line for the pension fund’s opposition to say-on-pay votes. Back in 2013, CalPERS voted down 9% of executive pay plans. The last two years, that number has been over 50%.
Comp Committee members are now also facing real-time consequences from that opposition. Last year, CalPERS voted “against” 3402 directors last year at 1267 companies – a significant increase from the tally of 2716 that I blogged about last summer. Last year was the first year the pension fund applied its policy to vote against comp committee members in the same year as voting against say-on-pay. CalPERS also says that it wrote to all of those companies to discuss the negative vote. Only 35% responded.