Marketing & Communications

JUST Capital, Forbes Name America's Most JUST Companies for 2018

JUST Capital and Forbes today released the 2018 list of America’s Most JUST Companies, an annual ranking of the 1,000 largest publicly traded US corporations on the issues Americans care about most, including fair pay and good benefits, customer treatment and privacy, beneficial products, environmental impact, job creation, and community support in the US and abroad, as well as ethical leadership and long-term financial growth.

By Sustainable Brands | Published 6 years ago | About a 4 minute read

JUST Capital and Forbes today released the 2018 list of America’s Most JUST Companies, an annual ranking of the 1,000 largest publicly traded US corporations on the issues Americans care about most, including fair pay and good benefits, customer treatment and privacy, beneficial products, environmental impact, job creation, and community support in the US and abroad, as well as ethical leadership and long-term financial growth.

Overall, 37 companies are new to the JUST 100, while 63 were part of the list in both 2017 and 2018. Several JUST 100 leaders improved performance by strengthening workplace equity programs, including more pay equity analyses, increased diversity and inclusion targets, more extensive work-life balance programs, and greater board diversity. More retailers are also represented in the top quartile in 2018 due to wage increases, improved benefit disclosures, and more concerted efforts to drive gender diversity.

“America’s Most JUST Companies consistently outperform their peers in wages, job creation, work-life balance, environmental impact and return on equity,” said Martin Whittaker, CEO of JUST Capital. **“**Aligning corporate behavior with the priorities of the American people is good for workers and good for business.”

2018’s Most JUST US Companies

As with the 2017 ranking, tech giants dominate the top 10. Microsoft ranked #1 on the 2018 JUST 100 list based on its high scores across a range of issues — including Workers, the Environment, Customers, and Leadership & Shareholders. Intel, Alphabet, Texas Instruments, IBM, NVIDIA, VMWare, Procter & Gamble, Adobe and Cisco Systems make up the top 10.

Other Sustainable Brands Corporate Members included in the ranking are: Humana (#11), AT&T (#13), General Motors (#14), Kimberly-Clark (#17), UPS (#20), 3M (#26), Ford (#37), Visa (#43), Target (#53), Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (#63), Johnson & Johnson (#66), Dow Dupont (#67), Campbell Soup (#84) and PepsiCo (#89).

About the methodology

JUST Capital conducts some of the most comprehensive surveys on public attitudes toward corporate behavior, reaching 9,000 American respondents in 2018 and more than 81,000 over the past four years. JUST’s 2018 survey of 9,000 respondents found that, when asked to identify what is most important for companies to prioritize, Americans ranked the following in order of importance: Workers, Customers, Products, the Environment, Jobs, Communities, and Leadership & Shareholders. The selection of companies draws from the Russell 1000 Index, which represents over 90 percent of the US stock market value. JUST’s scoring system is weighted to reflect the relative importance of the public’s priorities.

Companies in the JUST 100, compared to other Russell 1000 peers on average:

Pay their median workers 26 percent more.
Pay a living wage to 12 percent more of their workers.
Are 9 times more likely to have conducted gender pay equity analyses (69 percent vs. 8 percent).
Are 4 times more likely to have PTO and parental leave policy disclosures (80 percent vs. 20 percent).
Are nearly 2 times more likely to offer flexible work hours or daycare (92 percent vs. 48 percent).
Are nearly 4 times more likely to have diversity targets (31 percent vs. 8 percent).
Recycle 8 times more waste (41 percent vs. 5 percent).
Give 6 times as much to charitable causes per dollar of revenue (2.4 percent vs. .4 percent).
Employ 2.4 times as many US workers.
Pay 99 percent fewer sales terms fines, 90 percent fewer environmental fines, 71 percent fewer worker safety fines, and 41 percent fewer EEOC fines per dollar of revenue.
Have 4 times as many female directors (27 percent vs. 6 percent).
Have a 5 percent higher return-on-equity (23 percent vs. 18 percent).

“Trust in our institutions is more important than ever right now. The JUST 100 recognizes companies that are doing right within society,” said Forbes Chief Content Officer Randall Lane. “The Rankings help companies gauge their progress on benchmarks that go far beyond quarterly earnings toward long-term value creation for all stakeholders.”

Corporations featured in America's Most JUST Companies will also be included in Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s JUST U.S. Large Cap Equity ETF (Ticker: JUST) – the first-ever exchange-traded fund based on just business behavior, constructed from JUST Capital’s rankings.

For the complete list America’s Most JUST Companies, visit www.justcapital.com. The JUST 100 will be featured in the December issue of Forbes and online with additional feature stories at www.forbes.com/just100.