By Jonathan Stempel<\/p>\n
NEW YORK, Feb 25 (Reuters) – AT&T has agreed to settle a lawsuit by four New York City \u200cpublic pension funds by letting shareholders vote on whether \u200cit should disclose the breakdown of its 133,000-person workforce by race, ethnicity and gender.<\/p>\n
New \u200bYork City Comptroller Mark Levine announced the settlement on Wednesday, eight days after the funds sued to block AT&T from soliciting shareholder proxies that would have excluded their diversity proposal from consideration at \u200cits 2026 annual meeting.<\/p>\n
AT&T, \u2060based in Dallas, did not immediately respond to a request for comment after market hours.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of companies \u2060ask the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission each year for permission to leave shareholder proposals off ballots without fear of enforcement action, and \u200bhave historically \u200breceived permission about half the \u200btime.<\/p>\n
The New York City Employees’ \u200cRetirement System, and funds representing police, teachers and other educational employees, said AT&T’s prior opposition to their proposal followed a November policy change by the SEC letting companies claim a “reasonable basis” to exclude shareholder proposals.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday\u2019s settlement is a major win for investors amid \u200congoing attempts to undermine transparency and accountability,” \u200bLevine said in a statement. “AT&T shareholders \u200bwill now have the \u200bresponsibility to vote on our proposal that requests disclosure \u200cof clear and detailed data \u200bto help investors \u200bbetter assess its efforts to advance equal opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many companies have deemphasized diversity, equity, and inclusion since U.S. President Donald Trump \u200bannounced a crackdown on \u200csuch efforts one day after beginning his second White \u200bHouse term.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing \u200bby Chris Reese and David Gregorio)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK, Feb 25 (Reuters) – AT&T has agreed to settle a lawsuit by four…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[29536,18079,9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-145381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-att","tag-mark-levine","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}