Lumen

Lumen contributes to universal and affordable access to digital technologies by providing discounts on its services to low-income households. Further, the company commits to integrating accessible design principles and has products designed for its customers with disabilities.

Lumen has partnered with Destination Imagination to teach basic digital skills to students from underserved communities. Additionally, the company has a flagship programme, P-TECH, for technical digital skills development. Lumen works with schools and colleges to design courses that provide technical training to students from vulnerable groups. These include girls and students from non-English speaking backgrounds and low-income households. Lumen also offers grants to teachers in schools across the United States to implement technology in their classrooms.

Lumen has a high-level commitment to cybersecurity and demonstrates senior-level oversight of cybersecurity. The company shows leading practice by making its information security certificate publicly available. It considers data privacy a key topic in its materiality analysis.

The company makes venture capital investments and supports start-ups. It also discloses the proportion of women it employs in tech roles.

Lumen can consider introducing a dedicated initiative for enhancing digital opportunities for women and girls to help reduce the digital gender gap. The company can also expand on its commitments and support for accessibility, including reporting the number of its employees with disabilities. Additionally, the company can improve transparency in relation to how the economic value it creates is distributed among its stakeholders as well as its employment and taxes paid in its markets of operation.

Lumen has initiatives for developing technical digital skills and advancing school connectivity, but the company is less transparent in reporting the metrics for these initiatives compared to other companies. In addition, Lumen has not yet commissioned a third-party impact assessment for its existing programmes.

Lumen meets some industry norms in the area of use, but it is less transparent about privacy and security than other digital companies. It can improve its performance by disclosing a standalone security document that details how cybersecurity is managed in the company. Furthermore, as a digital company, Lumen should make a high-level commitment to child online safety.

The company lags in open and inclusive innovation compared to its peers. There is little evidence of a company commitment to open source projects and standards, initiatives for sustainable development, or support for the tech start-up ecosystem. In addition to these topics, Lumen has an opportunity to disclose how it considers ethics in its research and development (R&D) activities.

Lumen commits to respecting human rights and the ILO core labour rights. It also outlines an expectation, in a publicly available policy statement, for its business relationships to commit to respecting the ILO core labour rights. Furthermore, the company has a grievance mechanism accessible to workers and external stakeholders to raise human rights concerns and complaints. However, Lumen does not disclose a process to identify, assess and act on salient human rights risks associated with its own operations and with its business relationships. Moreover, the company does not engage with stakeholders whose human rights could be impacted by its operations.

Lumen publicly commits to respecting worker health and safety and it discloses information on the collective bargaining agreements covering its workforce. However, the company does not disclose a policy commitment stating that it does not require workers to work more than regular and overtime hours. Furthermore, Lumen provides no relevant evidence in relation to paying its workers a living wage or how it works to support its business relationships in paying their workers living wages. While the company publicly commits to promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment, it does not disclose any time-bound targets on the subject. Additionally, Lumen has an opportunity to disclose workforce diversity information on more indicators of diversity, such as age group, per employee category.

Lumen has a policy prohibiting bribery and corruption, but it does not include anti-bribery and anti-corruption clauses in its business relationship contracts. The scope of the company’s tax strategy is limited to the UK. Furthermore, while Lumen discloses the income taxes it pays in three categories – federal, state and foreign – it does not disclose its income tax payments in individual tax jurisdictions. Lumen does not disclose its approach to lobbying and political engagement. Specifically, the company has no public statement indicating that it does not make political contributions, and it does not disclose its lobbying expenditures.