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WHEREAS, the size of executive compensation, often deemed excessive, has become a major public as well as corporate issue. We believe that boards, in setting executive compensation, should consider the s ocial responsibility and environmental performance , as well as the financial performance, of the company. We believe that:
- All too often top executives have received considerable increases in compensation packages even when the company’s financial performance or social responsibility performance has been mediocre or poor.
- The relationship between compensation and the social responsibility and environmental performance is an important question. For instance, should the pay of top officers be reduced if the company is found guilty of systematic sexual harassment or race discrimination or poor environmental performance, especially if the result is costly fines or expensive, protracted litigation? Should responsible officers pay be on a business-as-usual scale in a year of a major environmental accident?
- Questions of this type deserve the careful scrutiny of our board and its Compensation Committee. Many companies are now using social responsibility criteria in setting executive compensation. For example, more than 25% of Fortune 100 companies report that they integrate workplace diversity or environmental criteria in setting their compensation packages and several (including ChevronTexaco, Coca-Cola and Proctor & Gamble) report that they use both of these criteria. Over 70% use at least one social responsibility criteria.
- When compensation is tied to social responsibility, better social responsibility performance will inevitably follow.
RESOLVED, the shareholders request the Board’s Compensation Committee, when setting executive compensation, to include social responsibility and environmental (as well as financial) criteria among the goals that executives must meet.
SUPPORTING STATEMENT
We believe that it is especially appropriate for our company to adopt social responsibility and environmental criteria for executive compensation because:
- Exposure to smoking in motion pictures is the primary recruiter of new adolescent smokers in the United States (The Lancet, June, 2003). Controlling for all other factors, a longitudinal study of more than 2,500 adolescents found this exposure accounted for 52% of smoking initiation in the group.
- Those researchers also found that the promotional effect of on-screen exposure to tobacco use was largest among children of nonsmokers. Thus, exposure to smoking in movies can neutralize the positive effects of parental role modeling and parental opposition to smoking.
- Content analysis studies at the University of California-San Francisco found that, in the five years 1999-2003, 75% of all 170 live-action movies our Company released to theaters included smoking; 65% of our youth-friendly movies included smoking.
- In both 2002 and 2004 the government’s Centers for Disease Control cited frequency of smoking in movies as a primary reason that youth smoking rates are dropping more slowly than earlier.
Expert commentary published in The Lancet has projected that eliminating smoking from future films rated G, PG and PG-13 would reduce by half the estimated 390,000 adolescents recruited by their exposure to such scenes in all U.S. releases and avert 50,000 future deaths a year from tobacco-related disease. Move to top
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