If you own an individual stock, you get to vote on shareholder resolutions and board of directors at the corporation's annual meeting. But if you own a mutual fund, the MUTUAL FUND gets to vote for you. And too often, the MUTUAL FUND votes with the corporation against environmental, labor and good governance shareholder resolutions.
To find out how your mutual fund voted on your behalf click here.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has a searchable database of mutual funds. However, you need to identify which family of funds you hold. So for example if you have a Putnam Fund, type "Putnam" into the Company Name box. This will give you a list of Putnam Mutual Funds.
You can then find, for example, the Putnam Discover Growth Fund. Then you look for the N-PX (Annual Report of proxy voting record of management investment companies). Then you can view the votes for directors, auditors, and shareholder resolutions at each company in the fund and find out that Putnam tends to vote with management and against shareholder resolutions at the annual meeting.
You may then want to contact your mutual fund by telephone, e-mail or letter and follow-up asking them to support labor, environmental and good governance shareholder resolutions when they vote on your behalf.
