401k owners generally have no say due to low number of shares. And most likely they are not in a position to make a judgement of the decision a management makes.
Who is looking out for them? Not the CEO and I don’t think the board either. You need to have a lot of shares before you have an influence.
Their corporate governance teams are surprisingly small. Vanguard has only something like 35 people overseeing thousands of companies and voting on hundreds of thousands proposals each year.
The entire point of having ISS (or Glass Lewis) advise on voting and offer options like autopilot is to give the collective power of all those tiny 401K balances to a single unifying entity who can help drive shareholder-friendly terms (or at least provide a partial balance to what might otherwise become too boardroom-friendly terms). I view that the voting is on autopilot as a potentially positive control not the negative that you seem to believe it to be.
Some fund companies commit to following ISS advice across the board or on certain topics. Others like Vanguard delegate the voting power to fund managers (who have access to ISS reports but aren't obliged to follow it slavishly).
I would expect the overwhelming majority of actively managed funds to vote with management recommendations. If they didn’t agree with management, it’s much quicker and more effective to decline to invest rather than invest and then vote against them.
Who is looking out for them? Not the CEO and I don’t think the board either. You need to have a lot of shares before you have an influence.