Long History of Shareholder Advocacy
Harrington Investments, Inc. (HII) has been actively engaged in shareholder advocacy for 25 years. During this time, we have worked to persuade more than 120 publicly traded corporations to increase their economic, social and environmental accountability and responsibility.
HII's founder, John Harrington, has been involved in the socially responsible investment movement for over 35 years, beginning as a staff member in the California Legislature working to end South African apartheid. His first shareholder resolutions were introduced in the early 1970's at Del Monte and Chevron corporations seeking information on the corporations' economic involvement in the then white minority-ruled country.
Investor Environmental Health Network (IEHN)
HII is currently a member of Investors Environmental Health Network, a collative partnership of investment managers seeking to remove toxic hazards from the market place. Through IEHN we are working to coordinate our shareholder advocacy on product safety with other with institutional investors. Our goal is to advance a program of identifying existing and potentially dangerous products manufactured and sold by corporations that may cause immediate as well as long-term health problems for consumers. We believe that tainted products not only negatively affect consumer’s lives, but also create a financial and legal liability for corporations that eventually erodes shareholder value.
Human Rights in China
Beginning in the early 2000's, HII engaged in a campaign to ensure that the rights of Chinese workers and citizens were protected by asking companies to sign the China Business Principles, a voluntary code of conduct developed by Amnesty International, the International Labor Rights Fund and Global Exchange. While HII introduced dozens of shareholder advisory resolutions, often supported by over 10% of shareholders, few companies seriously committed to protecting free expression of its workers since no company agreed to third party monitoring of any voluntary code of conduct, there was no agreed enforcement mechanism and no sanctions we to be imposed if violations were found to occur.
Moreover, according to a 2001 study entitled China's Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's Republic of China, U.S. and Canadian technology and telecommunications companies were reported to be providing strategic and sensitive advanced technology to the Chinese police and military to violate their citizen's human rights. Additionally, companies such as Yahoo!, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Microsoft, Google and others have been working to restrict access and filter information on the Internet, as well as identify Internet users, including bloggers who advocate democracy, leading to their arrest, imprisonment and often torture.
Binding Bylaw Resolutions
HII believes that voluntary corporate codes of conduct and corporate social responsibility reports have been put forward by corporate management in an effort to obfuscate their companies' complicity with human rights violations. In their eagerness to placate human rights advocates, the companies have adopted meaningless voluntary codes while continuing to do business with the Chinese terrorist government, strengthening the government's repressive technological infrastructure and overall economy.
Beginning in 2007, HII advanced a program of introducing binding by-law amendments as shareholder resolutions to a number of corporations held by HII and the clients of HII. The first of several include shareholder resolutions to create a Board of Directors Committee on Human Rights, in an effort to recognize that directors have a fiduciary duty to avoid complicity with foreign governments that consistently and flagrantly violate internationally recognized human rights. HII believes that this a modest proposal to respond to human rights abuses worldwide and corporate complicity in violating those basic rights. This would recognize a board's fiduciary duty to adhere to a universal code of human rights while accepting personal and collective responsibility for corporate action. This fiduciary responsibility would insure that shareholder value and reputation would remain intact while avoiding costly litigation and a loss of investor confidence.