Workers’ rights set to remain shareholder priority this AGM season
Shareholders are set to maintain a focus on human rights during the upcoming AGM season, despite a drop in support for broader sustainability proposals.
According to data released by SquareWell Partners over the weekend, human rights policies and Workplace Health & Safety were among the topics to receive the greatest level of support from investors last year.
Human Rights and Human Capital were two of just four sustainability issues to be addressed through votes at large European companies in the first half of 2025, the research showed.
Support for sustainability proposals has tumbled in recent years, mainly due to political and legal pressure in the US, where many Republicans have argued that investors who pursue environmental and social goals are breaking the law.
Between 2022 and the first half of 2025, the only sustainability-related shareholder proposal adopted by a STOXX Europe 600 company was a 2024 request for Danish construction business DSV to continue enhancing its reporting on human and labour rights, including its due diligence processes.
Living wage proposals at UK retailers were among those to garner the highest support last year, especially at Next Plc and Marks & Spencer.
“Considering the global focus on affordability, we may expect investors to continue engaging on pay-related topics including living wage, pay equity, and the CEO/worker pay ratio across different markets,” said SquareWell.
The data comes the same week that the Business and Humans Rights Centre (BHRC) published its annual assessment of migrant workers’ rights.
In the report, the campaign group said had recorded nearly 750 cases of alleged abuse of migrant workers, linked to 584 companies.
Meta was named most frequently (12 cases), followed by adidas, Levi Strauss, LVMH and VF Corporation, which were each named in seven cases.
In response, Meta insisted its community standards “prohibit content that facilitates human exploitation, including content that recruits people for, facilitates or exploits people through human trafficking, including labour exploitation”.
To view other responses from companies named in the research, see here.
“Companies remained unidentified in 56% of cases, partly because workers feared naming their employer amid the risk of retaliation,” said BHRC.
Agri-food supply chains accounted for the highest number of cases in the database in 2025, followed by construction and engineering, and manufacturing.