Member statement at Kohl’s AGM

Yesterday, Frank Sherman, Chris Cox, and Tim Dewane attended the annual shareholder meeting at Kohl’s. For Kohl’s, the shareholder meeting was the closing of a significant chapter in the company’s history and the beginning of a new chapter. Having begun his career with the company in 1982, Kohl’s CEO Kevin Mansell retired, a post he has held since 2008. With the retirement, Michelle Gass is the company’s new CEO.

ICCR and SGI have a long history of engagement with Kohl’s. At the shareholder meeting, Tim Dewane, the JPIC director for the School Sisters of Notre Dame of the Central Pacific Province offered a statement:

Good morning Mr. Chairman and Kohl’s Board members. My name is Tim Dewane, I am the JPIC Director for the School Sisters of Notre Dame of the Central Pacific Province. The School Sisters of Notre Dame CPP are a long time shareholder of Kohl’s and a member of Seventh Generation Interfaith, an ICCR-affiliated coalition of faith-based institutional investors that has engaged in positive dialogue with Kohl’s for nearly 20 years. Our members first sat down with Kevin Mansell and Rick Schepp in 2000 to provide input into the language of Kohl’s Terms of Engagement, a set of standards on worker rights and working conditions for its suppliers throughout the world. Since 2000, faith-based shareholders have met with the company annually and have seen improvements its supplier’s performance on workplace human rights as well as significant improvement in its’ environmental sustainability of your operations through a variety of programs that are described in its 2017 CSR report.

We welcome Michelle Gass as Kohl’s new Chief Executive Officer, the first woman to occupy this important position at the company. We look forward to working with you and your staff. As you build on the legacy of Kevin Mansell we encourage you to expand and deepen the integration of Kohl’s commitment to corporate social responsibility throughout the company’s business strategy and messaging to customers, investors and to society. In the current environment, stakeholders and rating agencies, who have incorporated social and environmental criteria into their valuation of companies, are expecting more transparency of Kohl’s and other companies. Kohl’s has a good story to tell, one that we are working on to improve with every meeting we have with you.

We encourage you to apply ‘human rights due diligence,’ based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the new global norm, to identify potential risks to people and communities, especially where your business partners operate in high risk countries where rule of law is weak. In addition, we encourage Kohl’s to join a number of companies in aligning its CSR strategies to the realization of the UN Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015 to eradicate poverty, gender inequity, child and forced labor, adverse impacts of climate change, among others, by 2030.

Larry Fink, Chair and CEO of Blackrock, stated in his Letter to CEOs entitled, A Sense of Purpose, “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.” Pope Francis has echoed the understanding of many our own Kohl’s customers when he said that purchasing is not simply an economic act, but also a moral one. We are called to love and care for our neighbors as our selves and in today’s world our neighbor includes not only the folks in this room, or those here in Menominee Falls, but all those whose lives touch ours – including the garment workers in Bangladesh and elsewhere.

We look forward to working with you to build on Kohl’s solid commitment to quality and community – with profits we can all live with. Thank you!

A PDF version of Tim’s statement can be found here.