Greenwashing is evolving—and so are the tools to uncover it.

In our most recent webinar, "How to Spot Greenwashing vs Real Sustainability Using AI," SESAMm CEO Sylvain Forté and Fingreen AI CEO Louis Frank sat down and unpacked the complexities of ESG credibility in today’s climate-conscious market. From emerging patterns in greenwashing to the rise of corporate silence—greenhushing—they explored what the latest data tells us and how AI is changing the game.

What you'll learn:

• Breaking Down ESG Buzzwords: An Introduction to Greenwashing, Greenhushing, and Greenwishing, showing how their mentions have surged in recent years—across sectors and regions.
• The Data Doesn’t Lie: While oil and gas and industrials are frequent offenders, every industry faces reputational risks—case in point: the controversies surrounding firms like DWS and BNY Mellon.
• Traceability & Transparency: How open methodologies can help verify commitments like Net Zero and SDG alignment.

Fill out the form to access the webinar replay now!

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This Labor Day, we take a moment to celebrate the contributions of workers worldwide and reflect on the critical labor issues and milestones that have shaped the past year. From corporate controversies to strides in workplace wellbeing, 2024–2025 underscored the ongoing importance of protecting fair, dignified work across industries.

Key Trends Shaping Labor Risks

Data from the past year shows that labor-related risks remain a significant and rising concern within the broader landscape of social risks affecting businesses and the global workforce.

• Working conditions overwhelmingly dominate the labor risk landscape, reflecting widespread worker actions, negotiations, and demands for higher standards.
• Workplace diversity and inclusion continues to be a significant area of focus, as organizations navigate evolving expectations around equity, representation, and belonging.
• Although smaller in proportion, forced labor and child labor risks remain critical concerns, attracting heightened regulatory scrutiny and public attention.

Real-world examples from the past year illustrate how companies have confronted—and, in some cases, exacerbated—these challenges.

Labor Controversies: A Year of Struggle and Advocacy

Several major companies faced notable labor controversies over the past year, revealing systemic issues and prompting calls for change:

• Starbucks Corp weathered a turbulent year, battling union disputes and a lawsuit alleging the company sourced coffee from a Brazilian supplier linked to slave-like working conditions. Domestically, tensions escalated with Starbucks Workers United amid widespread strikes across nine states, unlawful store closures, and stalled contract negotiations. Meanwhile, the company announced over 1,000 corporate layoffs as part of broader restructuring efforts.
• Volkswagen AG grappled with deep unrest, both at home and abroad. Mass strikes erupted over layoffs and wage cuts in Germany following the company’s decision to scrap its historic no-layoffs policy. Internationally, Volkswagen’s sale of its Xinjiang plant, under scrutiny for alleged human rights violations, highlighted the persistent pressure to address ethical concerns in global supply chains.
  
• Glovo faced intensifying scrutiny in Europe. Labor inspections and court rulings in Spain and Italy found the company had misclassified thousands of workers, evaded Social Security contributions, and skirted labor laws through subcontracting. Substantial fines, criminal complaints, and penalties for illegal worker surveillance have kept Glovo in the labor rights spotlight.
  

Other companies also faced investigations over child and forced labor violations. To mention a few, HelloFresh faced an investigation in the U.S. regarding allegations of migrant child labor at its Illinois facility, which has led to lawsuits from shareholders. Similarly, JBS USA reached a $4 million settlement related to child labor violations identified in its meatpacking plants. Additionally, Temu, managed by PDD Holdings, is being investigated in both the U.S. and Europe for purported connections to forced labor in China, highlighting ethical issues in global e-commerce supply chains.

Positive Highlights: Advancing Workplace Excellence

Despite these challenges, 2024–2025 also featured companies making meaningful strides in promoting employee well-being and ethical labor practices.

The steady engagement around Sustainable Development Goal 8—promoting decent work and sustained economic growth—remains a bright spot. While progress is ongoing, consistent attention to this goal underscores its critical role in shaping future business and social outcomes.
Several companies stood out for their positive contributions:

• Alight Solutions was recognized by Newsweek as one of America’s Greatest Workplaces for Mental Wellbeing 2025. Initiatives like Mindful Mondays, peer mentoring, and partnerships with organizations such as NAMI-NYC demonstrate Alight’s commitment to fostering a thriving, mentally healthy workforce.
  
• KnowBe4, a cybersecurity training leader, was named one of the Best Workplaces in Technology for the GCC region. Its culture of transparency, ownership, and continuous professional growth has positioned it as an exemplary employer.
  Cushman & Wakefield earned dual accolades: inclusion in the 2025 Global Outsourcing 100 by IAOP and a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index. These honors reflect the firm’s dedication to operational excellence and workplace inclusivity.
  

Looking Ahead: Progress and Persistence

As we mark Labor Day 2025, one truth stands out: while important progress has been made, much work remains. Workers continue to push for safer conditions, fair treatment, and respect across industries, prompting organizations to adapt and evolve.

Happy Labor Day!

Teams that monitor ESG controversies usually have the opposite of an information shortage. A single incident can generate dozens of articles within a few days, each covering the same underlying event, often repeating the same facts with a few new details.  At a certain point, the sheer number of articles makes it hard to tell which developments are material and which are just the same story told again.

The volume is the part that breaks traditional approaches. Millions of articles are written every day across hundreds of languages, more than any team of analysts could read, let alone reconcile into a clear timeline of an evolving controversy. This is not a problem you solve by adding more people; the scale is on a different order of magnitude from human reading speed.

What changed is that language models can now read, categorize, and evaluate. They cover that volume in every language, judging whether two articles describe the same incident, whether one marks a new development, and how incidents link into a single controversy over time.  Leveraging the latest AI models is the only way to structure this much material and generate daily updates. 

SESAMm runs this across the ten million documents it ingests each day, from more than four million sources in over 100 languages, including premium news wires, NGO bulletins, company communications, and discussion forums. The result is ESG controversies organized into three layers: articles, events, and cases.

From Articles to Events to Cases

Each layer builds on the one below it, and each answers a different question an analyst needs answered.

Articles are individual news articles or documents: the raw material.

Events group the articles that describe the same specific incident or development. When forty outlets cover the same supplier labor issue, those forty articles become a single event, with the underlying coverage attached. Articles published close together in time and describing the same development are grouped; an article describing a genuinely new development, even on the same broader topic, forms a separate event. A strike in 2022 and a similar strike in 2024 at the same supplier are recorded as two events, because they are distinct incidents rather than a continuation of one.

Cases sit above events. A case ties together the events that belong to the same underlying controversy as it unfolds, with no fixed time limit. An oil spill, the regulatory investigation that follows it, and the settlement that closes it months or years later are three separate events but one case.

Articles tell you what was written, events tell you what happened, and cases tell you how a controversy is developing. All three sit in the same view: one entry per controversy, with the chronology of events nested inside it and the source articles a click below that.

Why the Underlying Data Matters

A three-layer structure is only as good as the data underneath it. To capture a controversy from start to finish, that data has to include the early signals that appear in regional press, NGO bulletins, or non-English sources before larger outlets report them, sometimes days later.

SESAMm's coverage spans more than 100 languages and extends well beyond mainstream news wires, so its cases are built on a wider base than most monitoring platforms screen. A controversy that starts in a local-language outlet, moves through regional media, and reaches the international press is captured as a single continuous case, rather than surfacing as disconnected alerts or being missed altogether in its early stages.

What Does This Change in Practice?

Three things change in day-to-day work.

The count starts to mean something. A rise in the number of cases reflects new controversies emerging, not an old one being picked up by more outlets.

Trajectories become visible. As a case accumulates new events over the months, the progression from complaint to investigation to hearing to settlement is easy to follow, rather than being buried in hundreds or even thousands of articles. 

Analysts spend their time differently. Less of it goes to clearing duplicate headlines, and more to the important judgment calls. 

What This Looks Like in the SESAMm Dashboard

In the dashboard, a company appears as a single entity with its related cases listed beneath it. Each case includes a controversy summary, an ESG risk classification, and an intensity score, with related events nested underneath and the original source articles just a click away. A case that draws on hundreds of articles becomes a short, readable list instead of hundreds of separate incidents.

Every case is fully traceable. Analysts can drill from a case down to its events, and from any event to the articles that produced it. The time period is set from the top of the dashboard, so older incidents do not crowd the view when the focus is on recent activity.

Reducing Noise in Adverse Media Monitoring

In practice, those forty articles collapse into one event, and that event sits inside a single case that is still developing, caught early and drawn from sources most platforms never see.

Grouping articles into events removes duplication caused when many outlets cover the same incident. Grouping events into cases keeps a controversy intact as it develops, rather than scattering it across months of separate alerts. Because this runs across ten million documents a day in more than a hundred languages, it holds up even for controversies that start far from the mainstream press.

The result is a view where the numbers carry meaning, the direction of an issue is clear, and the underlying articles stay one click away for full validation. 

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