Apple finishes 20th in the JUST 100 list as part of its 2024 Rankings of America’s Most JUST Companies

Apple finished 20th in the JUST 100 list as part of its 2024 Rankings of America’s Most JUST Companies, an annual ranking of large public companies on issues of key importance to the American public.

While Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet continue to make the list, their relative rank has dipped compared to previous years, with only Apple staying in 2024′s top 20.

Hewlett Packard finished first among tech peers, a perennial sector leader in the JUST 100, in three core categories measured by Just Capital: workers, communities, and the environment. As noted by CNBC, its strong set of employee benefits, including the longest maternity and paternity leave of any company; its efforts within communities to bring workers back into the labor force; and its strict net zero goals and carbon emissions disclosures, were key to rising to the top of the list.

Analysis of worker pay, benefits and opportunities, more than any other measures, are critical to top list performance, with Just Capital’s methodology based on annual polling of the American public and how Americans define “doing right by all stakeholders.”

“Worker issues are still front and center,” said Martin Whittaker, founding CEO at Just Capital, the nonprofit research firm founded by hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones and others to identify large public companies that outperform on stakeholder capitalism. 

The importance of workers has consistently risen in the polling data, and now represents roughly 42% of the JUST 100 methodology, with “paying a fair and living wage” the top issue within this category, representing just under 18% of the methodology.

The top 10 in the America’s Most JUST Companies are: Hewlett Packard, Bank of America, Accenture, Intel, Citigroup, the Cigna Group, Ecolab, Elevance Health, AMD, and Micron. Apple ranks 17th on the list.