AT&T Inc. has reached a swift settlement with several New York City pension funds, agreeing to place a shareholder proposal on its ballot that calls for greater transparency around workforce diversity reporting.

The agreement, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, resolves a lawsuit brought on Feb. 17 by four city retirement systems. The funds had accused AT&T of improperly excluding their proposal from the company’s proxy materials.

The plaintiffs — the New York City Employees' Retirement System, Teachers' Retirement System of the City of New York, New York City Police Pension Fund and the New York City Board of Education Retirement System — argued that AT&T unlawfully relied on the “ordinary business” exclusion to omit the measure. That provision allows companies to leave out shareholder proposals that deal primarily with day-to-day operational matters.

Under the settlement, AT&T will include the diversity-reporting proposal in its proxy materials, and the pension funds will dismiss their claims. Each side will bear its own legal fees and court costs.

Dispute Over Diversity Disclosure

At the heart of the dispute is a proposal asking AT&T’s board to adopt a policy requiring public disclosure of a report the company already submits annually to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That report includes detailed demographic data on the company’s workforce, broken down by race, ethnicity and gender.

According to the pension funds, AT&T previously committed to voluntarily releasing this information after a similar shareholder proposal in 2020. The company publicly disclosed the reports from 2021 through 2023, the funds said, but stopped doing so in 2024 without providing an explanation.

AT&T sought to exclude the renewed proposal for the 2026 proxy season and obtained a “no-action” letter from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in January. The letter indicated that SEC staff would not recommend enforcement action if AT&T left the proposal off its ballot, based on the company’s position that it was excludable under Rule 14a-8, which governs shareholder proposals.

The pension funds contended in their complaint that, historically, they would have had an opportunity to respond before the SEC issued its determination. However, they pointed to an SEC statement from November indicating that staff would not provide substantive responses to most no-action requests for the 2026 proxy season.

Case Details

The lawsuit, titled New York City Employees' Retirement System et al. v. AT&T Inc., case number 1:26-cv-01310, was assigned to Judge Lewis J. Liman in Manhattan federal court.

The pension funds are represented by attorneys from the New York City Law Department. AT&T is represented in-house.

With the settlement in place, shareholders will now have the opportunity to vote on whether the telecommunications giant should formalize and publicly disclose its annual workforce demographic reporting — a move that could influence broader corporate practices around diversity transparency.