NYC Pension Funds and AT&T Reach Settlement for Unlawful Exclusion of Shareholder Proposal Requesting Workforce Demographic Data Disclosure

New York, NY – Today, New York City Comptroller Mark Levine announced that four of the New York City public pension funds have settled their lawsuit against telecommunications giant AT&T for unlawfully excluding the Funds’ shareholder proposal ahead of the company’s upcoming annual general meeting. The lawsuit challenged AT&T’s decision as an unlawful attack on investor rights at a time of heightened concern over attempts to silence investor voices.

AT&T has agreed to include the proposal filed by the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, Teachers’ Retirement System, Police Pension Fund, and Board of Education Retirement System in on the ballot in the company’s proxy statement that will be mailed to investors later this spring. The proposal simply asks AT&T to do what its peers, Verizon and T-Mobile, and many of the country’s largest companies already do: publicly disclose their Consolidated EEO-1 Report.

“Today’s settlement is a major win for investors amid ongoing attempts to undermine transparency and accountability and sends a strong message to other publicly traded companies,” said New York City Comptroller Mark Levine. “Less than a week after the New York City public pension funds filed their lawsuit, AT&T recognized clearly and swiftly that it must abide by the federal securities law. AT&T shareholders will now have the responsibility to vote on our proposal that requests disclosure of clear and detailed data to help investors better assess its efforts to advance equal opportunity.”

Under Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 14a-8, a company must include a shareholder proposal in its proxy solicitation materials if the proposal meets the eligibility and procedural requirements, unless the company can affirmatively demonstrate that the proposal falls within one of Rule 14a-8’s recognized exclusions. Here, AT&T announced its intent to exclude the proposal in December 2025, based on the company’s erroneous contention that it concerns the company’s “ordinary business.”

Like many of its peers who currently disclose this report, AT&T previously reached an agreement with the Comptroller’s Office in 2020 and subsequently published its Consolidated EEO-1 Report for several years. However, as part of the company’s broader recent pullback from public diversity commitments, it recently ceased publication without explanation, leading the Pension Funds to file their proposal in 2025.

Additional Background on the Comptroller’s Office’s EEO-1 Disclosure Efforts

In 2020, the Comptroller’s Office launched the successful Diversity Disclosure Initiative, encouraging America’s largest companies to voluntarily disclose their Consolidated EEO-1 Reports. The results have been overwhelmingly positive. As of 2025, roughly 80% of S&P 100 companies publicly disclose their Consolidated EEO-1 report, a comprehensive breakdown of the company’s workforce by race, ethnicity, and gender, an increase from about 14 in July 2020. The Comptroller’s Office, on behalf of the Funds, have reached agreements with major companies including the Home Depot, McDonald’s Corporation, Netflix, Nike, and Verizon Inc.

The disclosure of a company’s Consolidated EEO-1 Report is a cost-effective and meaningful way to provide investors with consistent information that allows for comparison of one company to that of its peers. Further, this disclosure imposes few if any additional costs on a company because companies like AT&T are already required to annually submit the report to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The funds are long-term shareholders of AT&T, collectively owning approximately 8.14 million shares of AT&T common stock, valued at $209 million as of December 1, 2025. They are represented by the New York City Law Department in this lawsuit.

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