Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn is taking his recent animal advocacy campaign to the nation’s largest supermarket chain, adding Kroger to a list that already includes fast-food giant McDonald’s.
In a letter Tuesday to Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, Icahn said he was seeking two seats on the company’s board to fight “deplorable animal suffering” and a “inconceivable” wage gap between McMullen and his average worker.
McMullen received $ 22.4 million in 2020, a year that caused Kroger to “inexplicably eliminate the meager $ 2 per hour increase in workers,” Icahn wrote. Kroger ended what he called “hero pay” after briefly offering the pandemic-fueled incentive to its more than 500,000 workers in April 2020. Instead, it went on to pay $ 130 million in bonuses, with full-time workers receiving $ 400 million and part-time $ 200. The average Kroger employee earned $ 24,617 that year, bringing his CEO and employee ratio from 909 to 1, according to the company’s 2021 power statement.
“Kroger’s inaction to create meaningful animal welfare policies and verification methods is totally out of line with consumer desire and current legislation,” Icahn wrote. “Kroger’s advice is also completely deaf to ESG’s growing concerns, specifically to provide a decent wage for its employees. You’ve run a company that certainly has the gravity to drive change, but instead, you have tolerated cruelty towards those who are the most helpless. ”
Kroger has raised partner salaries by more than $ 1.2 billion over the past four years, raising the average salary by 25 percent to $ 17 an hour, the company said in an email to CBS MoneyWatch .
Kroger said Monday that he had first heard of Icahn the previous Friday, when he “expressed concern about animal welfare and the use of gestation boxes in pig production.”
The company is not directly involved in animal husbandry or processing, but expects its suppliers to abandon gestation boxes by 2025, Kroger said.
The letter to McMullen expands Icahn’s offer to end the use of gestation stops that prevent breeding pigs from turning, with Icahn also last month throwing a possible fight with McDonald’s on the subject.
The investor has nominated two people for McDonald’s board elections in what is likely to be a first step toward a power struggle, the company confirmed in a Feb. 20 statement. Icahn, who owns only 200 McDonald’s shares, told Bloomberg News that his motivation had nothing to do with profits.
“I am really excited about these animals and the unnecessary suffering that happened to them,” Icahn said in an interview last month with the news service. A pig has a “good brain” and is a “sensitive animal,” added Icahn, one of Wall Street’s toughest investors. described as “not a warm person” by biographer Mark Stevens.
Icahn’s position was backed by Norwegian pension fund KLP, which has $ 72 million in McDonald’s, including its bonds and shares.
“It is absolutely appalling that McDonald’s has not ended the cruel use of gestation boxes for pregnant pigs in its supply chain, so we welcome this renewed attention and urge other shareholders to examine it closely. Until such practices are banned, it is the duty of a global and hugely wealthy corporation such as McDonald’s to ban them with immediate effect, “Kiran Aziz, head of investment at KLP, said in a statement. e-mail.
While Icahn and KLP want McDonald’s to only get “boxless” pork, the company said it does not believe the request is realistic.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a swine industry challenge to a 2018 California voter initiative ordering that pork sold in the state come from bristles that are at least 24 square feet in area. The National Pork Producers Council and other anti-law groups argue that it would cost farmers millions of dollars and increase meat prices.
Add Comment