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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is preparing to require public companies to disclose more information about how they respond to threats linked to climate change. Gary Gensler, the agency's new chairman, has said climate-related disclosure is a top priority, and President Biden plans to meet with top financial regulators to discuss the issue. The SEC has already sought industry input for a rule proposal that could be issued by October. The SEC has broad authority to require disclosures by companies selling securities. But how it elicits specific information about climate change, whose impact on every company’s bottom line isn’t always clear, is likely to become a political lightning rod and set off a burst of lobbying in Washington. The challenge, regulators and corporate officials say, is identifying which measurements are necessary to help investors gauge a company’s financial prospects, and how to set requirements that are flexible enough to generate specific, and not generic, information about corporate risks. “It’s a generational project unlike anything the SEC has ever undertaken,” said Robert Jackson Jr. , a former SEC commissioner. “It requires a great deal of expertise at the staff level and an enormous amount of market outreach.”

 

Wall Street Journal

Airlines for America, a group representing major U.S. airlines including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and others, along with major sector unions, has written to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland urging the Justice Department to prosecute the growing number of disruptive and violent air passengers. The letter said the “incidents pose a safety and security threat to our passengers and employees, and we respectfully request the [Justice Department] commit to the full and public prosecution of onboard acts of violence,” adding that the airlines and unions hope the Justice Department “will commit to taking action, along with coordination with the [Federal Aviation Administration], to ensure that egregious onboard conduct is fully and criminally prosecuted, sending a strong public message of deterrence, safety and security.”

 

ABC12 News

NBC News

Reuters

The Supreme Court has sided with Nestlé and Cargill in a lawsuit that claimed the companies knowingly bought cocoa beans from farms in Africa that used child slave labor. The justices ruled 8-1 in favor of the food companies and against a group of six adult citizens of Mali who claimed they were taken from their country as children and forced to work on cocoa farms in neighboring Ivory Coast. Justice Clarence Thomas said: "Although respondents' injuries occurred entirely overseas, the Ninth Circuit held that respondents could sue in federal court because the defendant corporations allegedly made ‘major operational decisions' in the United States. The Ninth Circuit erred by allowing this suit to proceed."

 

US News and World Report

Chief compliance officers in the financial sector would get more clarity on their exposure to regulatory charges under a framework proposed by the New York City Bar Association.  It lists a dozen factors that should be present to bring charges, and three mitigating factors that would weigh against such charges. Questions that regulators would be asked to consider under the framework include whether charging a compliance officer would help the SEC’s regulatory goals and whether a CCO made a good-faith effort to fulfill job responsibilities. A mitigating factor would be if a CCO voluntarily disclosed and actively cooperated with regulators. Current and former compliance officers said the proposal is a good step forward that could help clarify expectations for both regulators and the industry. But without changes at the corporate level, many compliance professionals will continue to face liability dilemmas in their day-to-day work. 

 

Wall Street Journal

Retail workers, drained from the pandemic and empowered by a strengthening job market, are leaving jobs like never before. Some 649,000 retail workers put in their notice in April, the industry’s largest one-month exodus since the Labor Department began tracking such data more than 20 years ago, finding less-stressful roles in other industries, where their customer service skills are rewarded with higher wages and better benefits. “We’re seeing a wider understanding that these were never good jobs and they were never livable jobs,” said Rebecca Givan, a professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University. “In many cases, the pay is below a living wage and the hours are inconsistent and insufficient. If anything, the pandemic has made retail jobs even less sustainable than they already were.” It is too soon to tell, she added, whether the latest exodus reflects a long-term shift away from retail work. Some employees, for example, may return to the industry once child care is more readily available and other pandemic-related challenges ease, but others are turning to industries where workers are in high demand.

 

Washington Post

Bumble, the dating app where women are in charge of making the first move, has temporarily closed all of its offices this week to combat workplace stress. Its 700 staff worldwide have been told to switch off and focus on themselves. Bumble has had a busier year than most firms, with a stock market debut, and rapid growth in user numbers. Senior executive Clare O'Connor revealed on Twitter that founder Whitney Wolfe Herd had made the move "having correctly intuited our collective burnout." Ms Wolfe Herd became the youngest woman, at 31, to take a company public in the US when she oversaw Bumble's stock market debut in February.

 

BBC News

Mint

A new survey from Benevity reveals that while nearly half of employees can remember their companies making commitments about racial justice following the murder of George Floyd, only 26% believe those commitments were completely fulfilled, compared to 61% of employees who can't say if their companies fulfilled their commitments. Over 70% of employees agreed that it’s important to have difficult conversations in the workplace about racial and social justice. More than half (69%) also said they would recommend their companies to others if addressing those issues is prioritized. Over a third of employees said they would quit if their workplace doesn’t do so. The corporate world has long struggled with a lack of diversity in its ranks, and a report compiled by the Alliance for Board Diversity and Deloitte recently showed that while the boards of Fortune 500 companies are improving in their diversity, that progress is still slow. These companies often tap the same pool of candidates, and of their newly appointed officials, white women greatly outnumbered people of color.

 

USA Today

Amazon is dumping millions of unsold items every year because it's cheaper for third-party sellers to have them destroyed than paying the online retailer to store them. An Amazon worker secretly filmed evidence of the waste over several months at the warehouse where he worked and passed the video to the UK's ITV News. The worker said: "From a Friday to a Friday, our target was to generally destroy 130,000 items a week. I used to gasp. There's no rhyme or reason to what gets destroyed. Dyson fans or Hoovers, the occasional MacBook and iPad." Sam Chetan-Welsh, political adviser to Greenpeace UK, said: "Expensive products that took energy and resources to manufacture come straight off the production line and into our overstretched waste system, and the high taxes needed to dispose of it all aren't being paid by Amazon." Commenting on the scandal, Philip Dunne, Conservative chairman of the Commons environmental audit committee, said: "How can Amazon protest its sustainability credentials with a straight face?"

 

The Times

The Times

A London-based hedge fund that suffered losses betting against U.S. retailer GameStop during the first meme stock rally in January is shutting its doors. White Square Capital, which at its peak managed about $440m in assets, had bet against GameStop, say people familiar with its positioning, and suffered double-digit per cent losses in January. The move marks one of the first closures of a hedge fund hit by the huge surges in so-called meme stocks. 

 

Financial Times

Reuters

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Monday that job growth should pick up in coming months and temporary inflation pressures should ease as the economy continues to recover from the effects of the pandemic. In testimony prepared for delivery to Congress, he said the economy has shown "sustained improvement," noting progress on vaccinations and vast stimulus efforts by Congress and the Fed. Mr. Powell said the lending programs “helped unlock more than $2tn of funding” that reduced job losses at businesses, nonprofits and local governments. The central bank leader also highlighted rising inflation pressures that he expects to lessen over time.

 

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