Shareholder activism uses the power of stock ownership to promote social change. Shareholder activists utilize dialogue, the filing of shareholder resolutions, and shareholder solicitation campaigns to raise awareness, build coalitions, exert pressure, and effectively create change in company policies and practices.

History of Shareholder Activism

In the past 30 years, thousands of social resolutions filed with companies by shareholder activists have broken new ground in fostering more progressive corporate policies. These include increased representation of women and minorities on corporate boards and in executive positions, nondiscrimination in employment, better disclosure of environmental liabilities, stopping environmentally damaging projects, getting companies to leave countries with human rights abuses, and improving the wages, benefits and working conditions of workers.

Shareholder action first gained national attention with the filing of scores of resolutions at companies in the 1980's asking them to divest from South Africa until apartheid was abolished. Institutional investors were pressured to drop the stocks of companies that refused to leave the country, and this was a major factor in pressuring many U.S. companies to leave South Africa.

Religious institutional investors have historically been the leaders of shareholder activism and still dominate the field. In recent years the socially responsible investment (SRI) community, environmental and human rights organizations, pension funds and organized labor have begun utilizing this unique means of reforming corporate practices.

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