The Advisors' Blog

In its latest “Portfolios on the Ballot” publication, the Shareholder Commons highlighted Majority Action’s pay equity-focused “vote no” campaigns at 20 companies.  Majority Action’s 2026 Inequality-Pay Ratio Vote Guide “recommends voting against say-on-pay proposals at companies with outsized CEO-to-worker pay ratios, arguing that extreme intra-firm inequality can suppress economic growth, weaken productivity, and create system-level risks that ultimately impact long-term portfolio returns.” Specifically:

For S&P 500 companies whose annual general meetings are between April 1, 2026 and June 30, 2026, a say-on-pay no-vote was recommended if:

• Key Indicator 1: The company’s 2024 and 2025 pay ratios exceed 494:1, ranking it in the top decile of pay ratios among all S&P 500 companies OR

• Key Indicator 2: The company’s 2024 and 2025 pay ratio are upper outliers compared relative to other companies in the same sector

Majority Action’s report notes that most investors have “rarely considered” CEO pay ratio in say-on-pay deliberations, which have largely focused on pay structure.That said, it calls out UK asset manager L&G as a notable exception, since it votes against S&P 500 say-on-pay when the disclosed CEO pay ratio exceeds 300:1 and three-year TSR underperforms the rest of the index.

– Meredith Ervine