The Advisors' Blog

As companies emphasize the importance of human capital management in their periodic filings, shareholder proponents are seeing if that lines up with a company’s pay practices.  Shareholder proponents submitted a proposal relating to the feasibility of increasing tipped workers’ wages at Dine Brands Global and Denny’s. The shareholder resolution for Dine Brands reads:

RESOLVED: that shareholders of Dine Brands Global (“Dine”) request that the board of directors analyze and publicly report on the feasibility of increasing tipped workers’ starting wage to a full minimum wage, per state and federal levels, with tips on top to address worker retention issues and economic inequities.

The supporting statement highlights Dine’s ESG strategy as including “the goal of empowering team members by “investing in employees” and “attracting and retaining diverse talent”” – and underscores a concern that the “misalignment between Dine’s stated goals in its annual reporting and the payment of a subminimum wage creates significant reputational and financial risk.”

While these tipped worker wage proposals are specific to certain industries, the supporting statement speaks to a bigger issue – companies need to shape the narrative on how their human capital management approaches fit in with the rest of their ESG messaging. “Human capital management” can be broken down into a plethora of discrete topics ranging from DEI, to worker safety, to workforce compensation – and you’ll want to make sure your approach to one HCM issue won’t clash with your ESG efforts elsewhere. Visit our “Human Capital Management” Practice Area to make sure you’re kept up to date on companies’ latest HCM priorities – and how their HCM and ESG disclosures are evolving with it.

– Emily Sacks-Wilner