New York City Comptroller Mark Levine urged AT&T shareholders to support his proposal to require the telecommunications giant to resume publicly issuing EEO-1 reports, which break down its workforce by race, ethnicity, gender and job category.
Levine, who oversees $320 billion in assets under management in the city’s five pension funds, wrote in a letter to shareholders that AT&T “abruptly” and “without explanation” stopped publishing its EEO-1 reports, which are submitted to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
“Investors benefit from standardized, quantitative, and comparable data on a company’s workforce,” Levine wrote. “The requested EEO-1 disclosure neither prevents nor discourages AT&T from reporting any other information regarding its organizational structure or diversity and inclusion commitments that the company believes are relevant.”
Levine argued that a vote for the proposal “affirms investors’ rights to express their views on potentially material issues through the ballot—by both being able to submit a shareholder proposal AND by being able to vote on it.”
He accused AT&T of attempting to unilaterally omit this proposal without engaging with the Comptroller’s office, which sued in federal court to get it included. “Only after the lawsuit was filed did AT&T agree to include the proposal, allowing this vote to proceed,” he wrote.
In February, four of the city’s pension funds sued AT&T for allegedly unlawfully excluding the shareholder proposal that would require it to publicly disclose detailed workforce demographic data. The funds stated they held about 8.1 million shares of AT&T, worth approximately $209 million as of December 2025, and sought an injunction preventing the company from soliciting shareholder proxies for its 2026 annual meeting unless the proposal is included. Later that month, the funds and the company settled the dispute, which stipulated that the proposal would be added to the ballot.
AT&T management told shareholders to vote against the proposal.
“Adopting a policy requiring that AT&T disclose its EEO-1 Report would not provide useful or additive information to our stockholders and carries risk of confusion,” AT&T wrote in its notice of the annual meeting and proxy statement. “While we embrace transparency, we disagree with the policy that the proposal would require.”
The company stated that there are limitations to the EEO-1 report, and it could present “a potentially confusing” measure for evaluating its workforce. “The EEO-1 Report provides a backwards-looking, moment-in-time view of our workforce that does not properly contextualize our vast workforce.”
AT&T also argued in its notice that the EEO-1 job categories “do not meaningfully reflect” its organizational structure or the frameworks it uses internally to assess workforce composition and analyze employment data.
“AT&T has always stood for merit-based opportunity,” the company wrote in its proxy statement. “AT&T complies with existing laws and is acting in accordance with the EEOC’s approach under which EEO-1 reports are submitted for regulatory purposes and are not otherwise publicly disclosed.”
AT&T has more than 110,000 employees in the U.S.
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