Lumen Energy | Racial Equity Audit at Lumen Energy

Status
Withdrawn
AGM date
Previous AGM date
Resolution details
Lead filer
AFL-CIO Reserve Fund
Resolution ask
Conduct due diligence, audit or risk/impact assessment
ESG theme
  • Social
ESG sub-theme
  • Diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI)
Type of vote
Shareholder proposal
Filer type
Shareholder
Company HQ country
United States
Resolved clause
RESOLVED: Shareholders request that the Board of Directors of Lumen Technologies, Inc. (“Lumen”) take the necessary steps to conduct a racial equity audit of Lumen to be performed by an independent third-party. Input from civil rights organizations, employees, and customer groups should be considered in determining the specific matters to be analyzed. A report on the racial equity audit, prepared at reasonable cost and omitting confidential and proprietary information (such as any information relevant to any legal claims against Lumen that are pending or about which Lumen has notice), should be publicly disclosed on Lumen’s website.
Whereas clause
Supporting Statement
As demonstrated by the Black Lives Matter movement, the fight for racial justice in the United States is more urgent than ever. We commend Lumen’s President and CEO for recently stating that “Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging is interwoven in everything we do, and we remain steadfast in our commitment to recruit and retain a diverse workforce.”1 However, we believe that a conducting a racial equity audit of Lumen’s policies and practices by an independent third- party will help Lumen improve its performance in achieving this goal.
Lumen’s recently disclosed EEO-1 employment data shows that the company has room for improvement to achieve racial diversity at higher levels up the corporate ladder.2 For example, only 1 percent of Lumen’s senior executives and 5 percent of Lumen’s mid-level managers are African American or Black compared to 8 percent of Lumen’s overall workforce. Hispanic or Latinx employees make up 4 percent of Lumen’s senior executives and 6 percent of Lumen’s mid-level managers compared to 8 percent of Lumen’s overall workforce.
In 2021, Lumen first observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a company holiday but did not provide the holiday to all of its employees who are union members. Instead, the company stated that the holiday would need to be negotiated when each union contract comes up for renegotiation.3 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a federal holiday in the U.S. that celebrates the life of the civil rights leader who was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee where he was supporting striking African American sanitation workers that were seeking to form a union in 1968.
Equal access to high-speed internet service is also an important concern for the communities of color that Lumen’s subsidiary CenturyLink serves. According to a recent report, “AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered lower-income and least-White neighborhoods slow internet service for the same price as speedy connections they offered in other parts of town.”4 We believe that conducting a racial equity audit will help Lumen better address the digital divide for access to broadband services in communities of color.
For these reasons, we urge shareholders to vote for this proposal.
1 https://assets.lumen.com/is/content/Lumen/lumen-esg-report
2 https://assets.lumen.com/is/content/Lumen/lumen-2021-eeo-1-report
3 https://www.channelfutures.com/diversity-inclusion/cwa-wants-to-dismantle-racism-demands-mlk-day-for-all- of-lumen
4 https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2022/10/19/dollars-to-megabits-you-may-be-paying-400-times-as-much-as- your-neighbor-for-internet-service

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