By Jonathan Stempel<\/p>\n
NEW YORK, Feb 17 (Reuters) – AT&T was sued on Tuesday by four New York City public pension funds, which accused it \u200cof wrongly refusing to let shareholders vote on their proposal to \u200crequire the telecommunications company to disclose the breakdown of its 133,000-person workforce by race, ethnicity and \u200bgender.<\/p>\n
In a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, the funds said AT&T cited a November policy change by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which lets companies that claim a “reasonable basis” to exclude shareholder proposals.<\/p>\n
The funds said SEC regulations provide no excuse \u200cfor AT&T to block \u2060a vote on their proposal at its 2026 annual shareholder meeting, and doing so causes “irreparable” injury. They want to prevent AT&T \u2060from soliciting shareholder proxies that exclude their proposal.<\/p>\n
According to the complaint, Dallas-based AT&T submits the diversity breakdown annually to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The funds said \u200bAT&T disclosed \u200bthe breakdown publicly between 2021 and 2023 \u200bbut stopped without explanation in \u200c2024.<\/p>\n
AT&T did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for New York City Comptroller Mark Levine did not immediately respond to a similar request.<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs include the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, and funds representing police, teachers and other educational employees.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of companies have annually asked the SEC’s Division of \u200cCorporation Finance for assurances they will not face \u200benforcement actions if they leave shareholder proposals off \u200bballots. The regulator has historically granted permission \u200babout half the time.<\/p>\n
SEC Chair Paul Atkins has said many \u200cshareholder proposals are invalid under the laws \u200bof Delaware, where \u200bAT&T and about two-thirds of the other Fortune 500 companies are incorporated.<\/p>\n
Many companies have deemphasized diversity, equity, and inclusion since U.S. President Donald Trump \u200bannounced a crackdown on such \u200cefforts, including a threat of civil litigation by the federal government, one \u200bday after beginning his second White House term.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel \u200bin New York; Editing by David Gregorio)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK, Feb 17 (Reuters) – AT&T was sued on Tuesday by four New York…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296221,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[3031,114,268,85,46,5708,6972,266,267,150138],"class_list":{"0":"post-296220","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-att","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-finance","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-pension-funds","15":"tag-personal-finance","16":"tag-personalfinance","17":"tag-u-s-securities-and-exchange-commission"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}