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Blaming Trump Tariffs Alone for 20,000 Laid Off UPS Workers Hides Key Factor: Stock Buybacks and Wall Street Greed
Blaming the Trump tariffs for every sin imaginable may be emotionally satisfying, but while it may end up being a factor, it is not the whole story here.
May 01, 2025
It’s such a tempting storyline: UPS announces that it will lay off 20,000 workers, citing “changes in the global trade policy and new or increased tariffs.”
There you have it. A perfect example of how Trump’s tariffs are screwing working people, many of whom voted for him.
Or is it?
UPS, like every major U.S. corporation, is in business to extract as much wealth as possible and shovel it to its shareholders and top executives in the form of stock buybacks and dividends. And like every major corporation, UPS will pay for that wealth extraction by laying off as many workers as possible. That may reduce the production of goods and services, but so be it, if it generates more money for shareholders and executives. In big business today, wealth extraction always comes first.
This is not a company struggling to make ends meet.
Let’s look at some of UPS’s numbers. In 2023, the company authorized $5 billion in stock buybacks, starting in 2024 with $500 million and another $5.5 billion in dividends. In 2025, UPS plans to spend another $1 billion on stock buybacks, as well as $5.5 billion more in dividends. In 2024, not incidentally, UPS posted $8.5 billion in profits. This is not a company struggling to make ends meet.
(Stock buybacks are when a corporation uses its own funds to repurchase shares and thereby raise the price of those shares, which greatly pleases its largest shareholders. Before deregulation in 1982, a company buying its own shares was considered illegal stock manipulation.)
To maintain this wealth pump for its investors and top officers, who are primarily compensated with stock incentives, cash needs to be generated and replenished. The simplest way to do that without acquiring more debt is to lay off workers.
Before the deregulation of Wall Street that came with the Reagan and Clinton administrations, no corporate manager would dare to lay off workers during profitable periods. To do so was a sign of poor management, a blemish on the CEO and his/her team. Workers and their communities were considered corporate stakeholders, right along with shareholders.
But after deregulation, the only stakeholder that mattered was the shareholder. The hell with workers and their communities. Companies began moving corporate headquarters to the sites of the highest governmental bidders, and in short order layoffs during good times became a symbol of smart management. Greed is good reigned supreme. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers for the gory details.)
Do not lend any credibility to corporate PR announcements. Their job is to do all they can to obscure how much they are shoveling to Wall Street.
The Teamsters union, which represents 300,000 UPS hourly workers, will fight these recently announced layoffs. Sean O’Brian, who spoke at the Republican national convention in 2024, sees any Teamsters layoffs as a violation of the contract:
United Parcel Service is contractually obligated to create 30,000 Teamsters jobs under our current national master agreement. If UPS wants to continue to downsize corporate management, the Teamsters won’t stand in its way. But if the company intends to violate our contract or makes any attempt to go after hard-fought, good-paying Teamsters jobs, UPS will be in for a hell of a fight.
We can be sure that the Teamsters will be looking closely at UPS’s finances, especially the large amounts going to stock buybacks and dividends. They will not sacrifice their members’ jobs on the altar of obscene wealth extraction.
Will the Trump tariffs have a major impact on UPS jobs?
We just don’t know that yet. But one thing we know for sure: Do not lend any credibility to corporate PR announcements. Their job is to do all they can to obscure how much they are shoveling to Wall Street. Their credo: The extent and consequences of the wealth extraction machine must never be revealed.
Blaming the Trump tariffs for every sin imaginable may be emotionally satisfying. But letting larger corporations and their Wall Street handlers off the hook when it comes to job destruction, which the Democrats have done for more than a generation, is in large part why we have Trump in the first place.
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15 Big Corporations Used Trump Tax Cuts to Pump $839 Billion Into Buybacks, Dividends
"There's nothing to be gained for everyday Americans by doubling down on the Trump corporate tax breaks—a historic mistake that added trillions to the deficit while threatening critical priorities like Social Security and Medicare."
Oct 23, 2024
The 15 largest corporate beneficiaries of former President Donald Trump's 2017 tax law have dumped a combined $839 billion into executive-enriching stock buybacks and dividends since the measure's passage, according to research released Wednesday by the progressive watchdog group Accountable.US.
The new analysis, which cites figures from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, was published amid an ongoing congressional debate over whether to extend elements of the 2017 law that are set to expire at the end of next year. It also comes as Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is campaigning on a fresh round of tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations.
Republican lawmakers, bolstered by an army of corporate lobbyists, have signaled that they are prepared to quickly ram through new tax breaks if Trump wins the presidency and the GOP secures control of the House and Senate in next month's election.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.
"The biggest corporate winners of the Trump tax giveaway used their massive windfall mostly to pad profits and enrich a small group of wealthy investors instead of raising their workers' wages and lowering prices for consumers," Accountable.US president Caroline Ciccone said in a statement. "There's nothing to be gained for everyday Americans by doubling down on the Trump corporate tax breaks—a historic mistake that added trillions to the deficit while threatening critical priorities like Social Security and Medicare."
"It's time billionaires, wealthy tax cheats, and price-gouging corporations stop avoiding their fair share of taxes at the expense of everyone else," Ciccone added.
"The Trump administration's giant corporate tax cut mainly resulted in higher executive pay and massive shareholder payouts."
The 15 corporations examined in the new report are Verizon, Walmart, AT&T, Meta, Home Depot, Intel, Comcast, Walt Disney, Visa, Capital One Financial, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Lowe's, United Parcel Service (UPS), and Texas Instruments.
Collectively, according to the Accountable.US report, those companies saw their profits surge by over $257 billion and have spent over $464 billion on stock buybacks and $374 billion on dividends since the passage of the Trump-GOP tax cuts. Large shareholder payouts in the form of share repurchases—which are on track for a new U.S. record in 2024—have been linked to mass layoffs.
In the years preceding enactment of the 2017 law, which cut the statutory corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, the 15 corporations studied in the new analysis paid an average effective tax rate of 27%. In the four years following the law's passage, the companies paid an average effective rate of 13%.
Meanwhile, the substantial benefits that the law's boosters promised the U.S. working class have not materialized.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted over the summer, "Trump administration officials claimed their centerpiece corporate tax rate cut would 'very conservatively' lead to a $4,000 boost in household income," but "research shows that workers who earned less than about $114,000 on average in 2016 saw 'no change in earnings' from the corporate tax rate cut, while top executive salaries increased sharply."
Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of the National Economic Council, said Wednesday that "instead of trickling down to higher wages for workers and producing a surge in business investment as they claimed at the time, the Trump administration's giant corporate tax cut mainly resulted in higher executive pay and massive shareholder payouts."
"It was a failed approach," said Ramamurti, "and Congress should use the expiration of key provisions of the Trump tax bill next year to bring in more revenue from corporations and the wealthy."
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Southwest Airlines Spent $5.6 Billion on Shareholder Gifts in Years Ahead of Mass Cancellation Crisis
"Southwest Airlines made a risky gamble that mass layoffs and spending billions of dollars on handouts to investors rather than fixing infrastructure would pay off with record profits," said one watchdog. "The airline lost that bet badly."
Dec 28, 2022
As travelers and airline workers reel from mass flight cancellations, a corporate watchdog noted Wednesday that Southwest spent nearly $6 billion on stock buybacks in the years ahead of the coronavirus pandemic instead of devoting those resources to technological improvements that unions have been demanding for years.
According to Accountable.US, the crisis Southwest has experienced in recent days amid a massive winter storm is "a problem of its own making." The organization pointed out that the airline opted "to spend $5.6 billion on stock buybacks in the three years leading up to the pandemic rather than making investments in infrastructure to be better prepared for extreme weather events like this week."
The watchdog group added that the company "even reinstated dividends earlier this month, the first major airline to do so after the pandemic."
"Southwest Airlines made a risky gamble that mass layoffs and spending billions of dollars on handouts to investors rather than fixing infrastructure would pay off with record profits," Kyle Herrig, the president of Accountable.US, said in a statement. "The airline lost that bet badly and now it's their customers left paying the price including the thousands stranded in the middle of holiday season travel."
"Southwest's well-compensated executives could have prioritized its workers and customers by preparing for the worst, but greed trumped all as they put a small group of wealthy investors first," Herrig added. "Consumers shouldn't be the ones stuck holding the bag for Southwest's greedy management decisions, but here we are. This is where the Transportation Department should start in any investigation into why this happened."
Southwest has canceled more than 5,000 flights this week—accounting for the bulk of flights canceled in the U.S.—and delayed hundreds more, stranding travelers and flight attendants, throwing holiday plans into chaos, and straining already-exhausted flight crews.
"Southwest's well-compensated executives could have prioritized its workers and customers by preparing for the worst, but greed trumped all."
Unions representing flight attendants and pilots have said that while the winter storm fueled some of the cancellations, deliberate decisions by Southwest management were ultimately responsible for what's been described as the company's "full-blown meltdown."
Specifically, the vice president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association toldInsider that the company's "outdated" scheduling software has been overwhelmed, wreaking havoc on operations.
"When we get out of position, it's a tough task for our schedulers to put it back together, and right now they're having to do it by hand," said Captain Mike Santoro, explaining that some flights were unnecessarily canceled because the airline's system was unable to adequately keep track of employees.
Lyn Montgomery, president of TWU Local 556, the union that represents flight attendants, told a local news outlet that "this is the worst I've ever seen in my 27 years of working as a flight attendant for Southwest Airlines."
"Obviously, the impact of Winter Storm Elliott created the issues, but the Southwest Airlines systems cannot recover because we have outdated technology," Montgomery said.
The New York Timesreported Wednesday that many of the scheduling issues "stem from the carrier's unique 'point-to-point' model, in which planes tend to fly from destination to destination without returning to one or two main hubs."
"Most airlines follow a 'hub-and-spoke' model, in which planes typically return to a hub airport after flying out to other cities," the Times noted. "When bad weather hits, hub-and-spoke airlines can shut down specific routes and have plans in place to restart operations when the skies clear. But bad weather can scramble multiple flights and routes in a point-to-point model, leaving Southwest staff out of position to resume normal operations."
\u201cWhen you dig into issues at airlines, banks, or other industries with large information technology needs, it often comes down to having multiple legacy systems, due to mergers, that don't talk to each other well and can't be updated because they would fully break.\u201d— David Dayen (@David Dayen) 1672159352
Randy Barnes, president of TWU Local 555, the union that represents Southwest ground workers, said in a statement Wednesday that "if airline managers had planned better, the meltdown we've witnessed in recent days could have been lessened or averted."
"Ground workers need more support," Barnes added. "Many of our people have been forced to work 16- or 18-hour days during this holiday season. Our members work hard, they're dedicated to their jobs, but many are getting sick, and some have experienced frostbite over the past week. In severe weather, it's unreasonable for workers to stay outside for extended periods. People need to be able to cycle in and out of the cold. The airline needs to do more to protect its ground crews."
More than 90% of the 2,760 cancellations in the U.S. thus far on Wednesday have been Southwest flights, according to data compiled by FlightAware.
The company's massive failures have drawn scrutiny from members of Congress and the U.S. Department of Transportation, which has said it is looking into the cancellations.
"This has clearly crossed the line from what’s an uncontrollable weather situation to something that is the airline’s direct responsibility,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said late Tuesday in an appearance on "NBC Nightly News."
In a statement, Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) similarly argued that "the problems at Southwest Airlines over the last several days go beyond weather."
"The committee will be looking into the causes of these disruptions and its impact to consumers," said Cantwell. "Many airlines fail to adequately communicate with consumers during flight cancellations. Consumers deserve strong protections, including an updated consumer refund rule."
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