The Rankings of America’s Most Just Companies is an annual evaluation that tracks and assesses the largest publicly traded U.S. corporations on stakeholder performance. Developed by the independent non-profit Just Capital, the rankings reflect how well companies measure up against the public’s definition of just business behaviour. For finance professionals, this tool provides critical, data-driven insights into corporate stakeholder performance, offering a standardised benchmark to evaluate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risk and value creation.

Organisation behind the tool

The rankings are developed and maintained by Just Capital, an independent non-profit organisation. The annual list of America’s Most Just Companies, also known as the Just 100, is published in partnership with CNBC. Just Capital collaborates with several research and data partners, including The Harris Poll for qualitative and quantitative surveys, SSRS for the Annual Weighting Survey, Revelio Labs for workforce intelligence and wage modelling, ESG Book for environmental data, and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) for governance data.

What the tool does

The tool evaluates and ranks companies from the Russell 1000 Index across five key stakeholder categories: Workers, Customers, Communities, the Environment, and Shareholders and Governance. Key functions of the methodology include:

• Surveying the American public to identify and prioritise core issues of just business behaviour using discrete choice modelling (Max-Diff).
• Evaluating companies on 17 distinct issues, such as paying a fair living wage, protecting customer privacy, and minimising pollution.
• Collecting and processing granular data points from public filings, regulatory records (such as Department of Labour and EPA fines), and third-party databases.
• Aggregating and normalising scores to produce an overall ordinal ranking of all evaluated companies, as well as industry-specific rankings.

Target audience

The primary target audience includes corporate leaders, investors, asset managers, researchers, and policymakers who require objective data on corporate stakeholder performance. It is also designed for the general public to understand corporate accountability and ethical business practices.

Relevance to finance professionals

The tool provides key insights that can be applied across various financial workflows:

• Risk assessment – Tracking regulatory fines (such as OSHA, EPA, and wage violations) and controversy data to identify operational and compliance risks.
• ESG analysis – Providing detailed metric scores on social issues (like pay equity and workforce demographics) and environmental issues (such as greenhouse gas emissions and resource use).
• Investment context – Informing investment decisions and powering financial products, such as the Just U.S. Large Cap Diversified Index which underlies commercial investment products like Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s Just ETF.