8/1/22, 9:59 AM The No. 1 ESG issue for Americans isn't climate change
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/13/the-no-1-esg-issue-for-americans-isnt-climate-change.html 4/11
Alphabet's contingent worker issues
The gig worker story is becoming even bigger as the Securities and Exchange Commission under
new chair Gary Gensler is considering a human capital disclosure requirement for companies.
The right answer isn't necessarily that companies need to make all workers staff, a move that
Uber has resisted, most notably in its successful effort over a California state ballot measure
about reclassifying independent workers. "What we don't want to do is the knee-jerk thing,"
Whittaker said. "It's easy to say this is bad, companies should be making all their workers full-
time employees. I know a lot of people think that, but we need to understand how does the public
really thinks about this. Once we saw how highly ranked it was, we saw we need to do more."
Just Capital knows for sure that workers are the No. 1 ESG issue to the American public because
each year it polls the public to create the weightings for its annual ranking, and for 2022′s list,
worker issues were weighted at nearly 40%, compadavidred to 10% for climate. A fair, living
wage was the No. 1 issue overall. The second-highest weighted area, Communities (20%), is
partially a workforce metric because it includes job creation.
Workers being among top issues in public polling has been consistent in recent years, according
to Alison Omens, the chief strategy officer at Just Capital, who during the Obama administration
was a top adviser for the White House on private sector engagement. "I would say the urgency or
intensity has increased," Omens said. "And people are saying with more specificity, 'this is very
important to me, as a worker, as a parent to a worker, and as a consumer, I really want to make
sure companies are thinking about this differently.' I would say it is more the degree of acuteness
than change in priorities," she added.
Engine No. 1, which recently scored one of the biggest ESG activist investor victories when it
won seats on the Exxon Mobil board to press the oil giant to make more substantial progress on
climate, said it now will be placing more focus on workforce issues.
The ESG model imperfections when it comes to assessing the rise of the contingent workforce is
not only an issue at the gig economy companies.
Alphabet, No. 1 on the 2022 JUST 100, uses a vast contingent workforce — in 2018, the number
of contingent workers at Alphabet surpassed staff employees for the first time and that temporary
workforce continues to attract scrutiny. Alphabet employs so many people directly (over
100,000), though, that it still provides enough data even with the split workforce to do well on
ESG workforce metrics.
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