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stock buybacks
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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Is Trump Falling Into the Trump Tariff Trap?
The Democrats are once again abdicating the jobs terrain to Trump, hoping instead that his tariff toy will blow up in his dictatorial hands. Instead of calling tariffs “insane,” Democrats should call them job-killing tariffs. And as prices rise, they can blame Trump for that as well.
Mar 13, 2025
Whether by design or instinct, candidate Donald Trump set a perfect trap for the Democrats when, in September 2024, he reacted to the John Deere and Company’s announcement that it would move a thousand jobs from the Midwest to Mexico. Trump said then:
I am just notifying John Deere right now that if you do that, we are putting a 200% tariff on everything that you want to sell into the United States.
Trump saw Deere’s announcement as the perfect opportunity to jump on Deere’s job destruction, which the company used to finance 12.2 billion in stock buybacks to enrich its investors.
The Democrats? They sent billionaire Mark Cuban out to the media to complain that the tariffs were “insane.”
But threatening tariffs did not feel insane to the Deere workers who were about to lose their jobs. Nor did they feel insane to the millions of other workers who had lost their jobs due to “free trade” deals like NAFTA.
The Democrats now have a chance to turn the tables—but, alas, they probably won’t.
The Democrats stumbled into the Trump’s tariff trap and provided many workers with yet another reason to abandon a party that had failed to say anything at all about the needless job destruction caused by overt corporate greed.
After Trump won the presidency last November, I was sure he would set more tariff traps, provoking the Democrats to reflexively react as corporate shills.
But along the way something funny happened. Trump fell into his own tariff trap, and his public support has fallen somewhat. The Democrats now have a chance to turn the tables—but, alas, they probably won’t.
Why Does Trump Love Tariffs?
Even the most ardent MAGA apologist knows that Trump has dictatorial impulses. He wants to play Brando in “The Godfather” and make you an offer you can’t refuse.
But playing Don Corleone in domestic affairs doesn’t come easily. Trump can flood the zone with executive orders, but the courts are still functioning and often enforce the law. Even a pliable Congress has rules which can get in the way of the legislative results Trump is demanding.
But there are two areas where Trump really can act unilaterally—foreign affairs and tariff policy.
As president, Trump is free to bully Ukraine, kiss up to Putin, threaten to annex Greenland, Panama, and even Canada. No one in the U.S. can really stop him. He doesn’t need the blessing of Congress unless he wants a new treaty, which he doesn’t.
Similarly, he can use Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which authorizes the U.S. Trade Representative, a Trump toady, to impose tariffs in response to unfair trade practices, which are not defined.
There is no way a full-scale trade war with Canada will do anything but shatter jobs on both sides of the border, while raising prices as well.
Tariffs are a shiny new toy for Trump to play with. He can turn tariffs on and off, making entire countries jump to his tune. Each day he comes up with new reasons to justify them—fentanyl, immigrants, unfair subsidies, too much control of domestic banking (God forbid!). But these are just excuses for having fun by intimidating entire countries.
Trump can also combine his control of foreign policy with tariffs, as he is gleefully doing with Canada. What fun it is to threaten to take down the Canadian economy with tariffs while bullying them into becoming the 51st state. Clearly Trump wants to flex his dictatorial muscles, even as his real one’s sag with age.
But by playing dictator, he has abdicated the targeted use of tariffs to protect jobs. There is no way a full-scale trade war with Canada will do anything but shatter jobs on both sides of the border, while raising prices as well. Why? Because corporations like John Deere are not fleeing to Canada to find cheaper labor.
As a result, a tariff war with Canada is likely to kiss goodbye as many U.S. jobs as are protected. But Trump doesn’t seem to care because he’s all in on making Canada sweat. Damn the jobs! Damn inflation! He’s simply in love with his unilateral powers, which no one else in the world has. That’s a high that beats fentanyl.
The Trump Trap of Stagflation
Trump may not know it, but he is playing with fire. Tariffs are certain to raise U.S. prices. Why? Because when U.S. corporations see that their competition from Canada faces price increases caused by the 25 percent tariff, the companies will raise their own prices, especially in key industries with only a handful of large competitors.
A tariff war with Canada is likely to kiss goodbye as many U.S. jobs as are protected. But Trump doesn’t seem to care because he’s all in on making Canada sweat. Damn the jobs! Damn inflation! He’s simply in love with his unilateral powers...
Furthermore, by Trump turning his tariff toy on and off, he is causing economic uncertainty. That uncertainty has already had a drastic impact on the stock market.
But it will get much worse if corporations hold back on investment decisions until Trump stops fiddling with his toy.
It’s a very big deal when corporations delay investment decisions. Slower investment rollouts can lead to an economic slowdown and even a recession. And such a downturn can quickly get out of hand, because the Wall Steet derivative games, the kind of which that caused the 2008 crash, are up and running again, bigger than ever.
So, here’s the trap. Tariffs will cause inflation, forcing the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates to combat price increases. And higher interest rates will further reduce economic activity, leading to more unemployment. The Fed then will be unable to boost employment, because that requires decreasing interest rates, which are likely to further fuel inflation.
Bingo, stagflation. I wonder how Trump will feel if morphs into Jimmy Carter?
What Should the Democrats Do?
James Carville is telling the Democrats to do nothing. Play dead and let the guy implode.
But that’s a very dangerous game. Even with all the chaos Trump still has favorability ratings close to 50 percent. His supporters see him taking action, it’s why they voted for him, and they will give him time to make his plans work. Yes, there are protests, but they’re nothing like in Trump’s first term. The danger is, if the Democrats give him uncontested time and space, Trump might find a way to escape from his trap.
Instead, the Democrats should take a page from Trump and put job protection on the top of their agenda. As tariffs bite and cause job destruction, the Democrats should show up and support those laid-off workers. Instead of calling tariffs “insane,” they should call them job-killing tariffs. And as prices rise, they can blame Trump for that as well.
I wonder how Trump will feel if morphs into Jimmy Carter?
More importantly, they should go after any company that receives taxpayer money and is laying off taxpayers. They should slam stock buybacks that enrich Wall Street wealth extractors and CEOs. They should make it perfectly clear that protecting jobs from corporate greed is the number one priority of the Democratic Party.
Will they do this? Dream on.
There is little indication that the Democrats are willing to upset their Wall Street backers by interfering with private sector layoff decisions and stock buybacks. The Democrats are once again abdicating the jobs terrain to Trump, hoping instead that his tariff toy will blow up in his dictatorial hands.
Maybe it will, or maybe working people will see that the Democrats still don’t give a damn about their job security. At least Trump is trying, they may say.
Until the Democrats offer a compelling working-class vision, those living paycheck to paycheck have reasons to stick with Trump who, at the very least, has buried the free-trade mantra that working people know has destroyed so many jobs and damaged their communities.
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When Will Public and Private Sector Workers Unite Against Mass Layoffs by the Billionaires?
Billionaires eat the jobs of working people for breakfast so there's no real point in distinguishing between the "good" and the "bad" ones. Until workers of all kinds are united against our common enemy, there is little hope for the kind of society the working class envisions—and deserves.
Mar 05, 2025
The destruction of jobs, both public and private, creates billionaires. But most working people don’t know that, and the Democratic Party is afraid to say it.
Why? Because billionaires who have killed jobs of all kinds, dominate both political parties with their ill-gotten gains. Money buys silence.
The power of billionaires is rising as their numbers increase. In 1990, there were 66 billionaires in the United States. In 2023 there were 748. And in the U.S. alone, billionaire wealth in 2024 increased by $l.4 trillion, that’s $3.9 billion a day.
How did that happen?
It’s hard to wrap your mind around how much a billion dollars is. If you earned $1,000 per hour, it would take you 68.5 years to reach $1 billion, and at that point you’d have as much money as one thousand millionaires. That’s a lot of money, more than we can imagine, certainly more than any human being needs, ever.
To become a billionaire, you have to be willing to kill jobs with reckless abandon. It is one of the most effective ways to extract money from working people.
But they earned it, right? Isn’t earning billions of dollars a just reward for unparalleled entrepreneurial success? And isn’t criticizing that success sour grapes, the same as criticizing what makes our country so prosperous, free, and strong?
Maybe, until you look under the hood.
To become a billionaire, you have to be willing to kill jobs with reckless abandon. It is one of the most effective ways to extract money from working people.
The carnage started with the deregulation of Wall Street in the late 1970s, widened during the Reagan years, and was then adopted as the mantra of the Clinton administration during the 1990s.
The deregulation of Wall Street allowed companies to buy each other up with few constraints, often using borrowed money and putting the debt on the books of the acquired company. Layoffs are then used to pay off that debt.
Deregulation also led to the legalization of stock buybacks, which allowed companies to repurchase huge amounts of their own shares and drive the share price up. Wall Street investors and CEOs, who were increasingly paid with stock incentives, became fabulously rich as the price of their shares rose, though their company was no more profitable. Layoffs are then used to finance those buybacks.
Before deregulation, corporate leaders were ashamed if they had to lay off workers. They saw that as a sign of their own failure as managers. CEOs then thought themselves to be in the service of their employees, their communities, and their shareholders.
But free-market ideologues in the 1970s waged a successful campaign to favor shareholder supremacy above all—jobs, workers and communities be damned! (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers, for the details)
Wall Street-driven job destruction happens in a flash. All it takes is a stock buyback, a merger, or a private equity purchase, and jobs will be cut overnight to pay for the deals.
That new cutthroat Wall Street mindset has led to approximately 18 million involuntary layoffs per year, year after year, since the 1990s.
But wait, you probably thought most job loss was caused by new technologies, like those that caused the disappearance of elevator operators and horse and buggy drivers?
Nope. Technological change, even AI, changes overall job composition slowly, over many years, even decades. Newness is expensive, so changes are adopted incrementally as costs come down.
But Wall Street-driven job destruction happens in a flash. All it takes is a stock buyback, a merger, or a private equity purchase, and jobs will be cut overnight to pay for the deals.
Public Employees Are Now Sitting Ducks
When labor unions represented more than 30 percent of private sector workers, from WWII to the 1960s, their wages and benefits improved year by year. So did the standard of living of public sector workers.
In New Jersey, for example, 40 years ago there were 60,000 high-paid auto workers with good pension plans. Public sector workers used them as a yardstick to increase their own compensation, as well. But today, those autoworker jobs are gone, which has put downward pressure on the wages and benefits of public sector workers.
Overall, in 1980, more than 50 percent of all private sector workers had pensions. Today, it’s only 11 percent. Meanwhile, 75 percent of state and local government employees, and nearly all federal workers, continue to have access to such plans. That’s why they are sitting ducks.
Divisive politicians can fire away by saying, “Why should private sector workers like you pay taxes to support public sector worker’s benefits that you don’t even have!”
There’s no way around it. The mass slaughter of jobs, whether public or private, grows billionaires.
That’s one reason why Trump and Musk have been getting away with trashing federal employees, with very little blowback from working people in the private sector, at least so far.
But there’s more.
Musk and his fellow billionaires need to cut federal government jobs so they can continue to stuff themselves at the federal trough. They want job cuts to pay for the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that go to the largest US corporations via tax breaks, subsidies, and fat federal contracts. Last year alone, Fortune reports that Musk received $6.3 billion in federal and local taxpayer funding, and during the past four years the total was nearly $25 billion.
Privatization of public sector jobs also is a bonanza for wealthy investors. Just imagine the billions to be made by turning over the postal service to the private sector.
There’s no way around it. The mass slaughter of jobs, whether public or private, grows billionaires.
“Save Our Jobs from Billionaire Greed.”
Imagine if federal worker unions and Democratic Party officials showed up at the plant gate of a company that was about to close its doors to finance hefty stock buybacks for its billionaire owners. A show of support for their fellow layoff victims and a unity message aimed at stopping billionaire job destruction would be simple to craft and easy to share. It would be news.
Why aren’t the Democrats doing this?
Because they don’t want to upset their billionaire donors by interfering with Wall Street’s pillage of working people. As Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic Party put it recently, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with the Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money…”
If the Democrats dared to look under the hood, they would find that every one of those “good billionaires” is making money from job cuts that boost the value of her or his portfolio.
I was born and raised as a working-class Democrat, but I know that the slaughter of public and private sector jobs won’t stop until there’s a new party that truly represents the interests of working people.
Only then can we fight back against the billionaires and their two-party poodles so willing to curl up in their laps.
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