Sister Annette Sinagra on Shareowner Activism
to Help End Modern Slavery

Sister Annette Sinagra, Adrian Dominican Sisters’ Portfolio Advisory Board (Coordinator 1989-1998, Analyst 1998-2009)

In celebration of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) 40th anniversary the organization is sharing stories of its members who made history by pioneering the practice of shareholder activism in a series of podcasts. Click here to link to the podcast of Sister Annette Sinagra, former coordinator and analyst for Adrian Dominican Sisters’ Portfolio Advisory Board, as she recounts efforts to improve working conditions for Haitian laborers in the Dominican Republic. Sister Annette’s podcasts is the ninth in a year-long monthly series of podcast entitled The Arc of Change.

As stated on the ICCR website, Sister Annette “makes the connection to recent shareowner activism with McDonald’s, where she filed a human rights resolution in 2006 to abide by International Labor Organization labor standards. She collaborated with the AFL-CIO and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Florida-based farm-worker rights organization that has documented modern slavery in Florida’s tomato fields. This first-year resolution survived McDonald’s appeal to the SEC to omit it from the proxy ballot, and ended up receiving eight percent support from voting shareholders, significantly surpassing the three percent threshold for re-filing the next year. More importantly, McDonald’s CEO, Jim Skinner, promised her directly to address the issue, and in 2007 McDonald’s agreed to increase tomato pickers’ pay more than a penny a pound, extending a similar victory of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers two years before with YUM! Brands - the parent company of Taco Bell.”

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