UPS Laying Off 12,000 People Because $9.9 Billion In Profits Just Isn't Enough
UPS Laying Off 12,000 People Because $9.9 Billion In Profits Just Isn't Enough
And some other labor news, because there is A LOT!
UPS announced this week that they will be laying off 12,000 people, approximately 2.4 percent of their global workforce — and, they say, they don’t expect those jobs to come back. Executives placed the blame for the layoffs not on their own shoulders but on the decrease in shipping needs post-COVID and, of course, labor costs.
As you may recall, UPS drivers won a hard fought battle earlier this year for higher wages and less batshit working conditions so they don’t die of heat stroke.
TO HELP YOU RECALL!
Is the company truly suffering? Well, no. It still had an adjusted operating profit of $9.9 billion, and while that was down 28 percent from the previous year, that decrease seems reasonable given the fact that people are now far more likely to leave their homes to buy toilet paper rather than having it delivered. Even with that, they “returned $7.6 billion of cash to shareowners through dividends and share buybacks.”
At the same time the company is laying off workers, the board of directors approved — for the 15th year in a row — an increase to the company’s quarterly dividend. This means that people are getting laid off, but shareholders are getting a raise.
It’s not quite clear whom the company will lay off yet — but USA Today says it won’t be a single unionized employee, which supports this speculation on the UPSers subreddit that it will largely be on the management side.
But don’t worry too much about CEO Carol Tomé, who raked in $19 million in 2022 and 27 million in 2021. She will be just fine!
RUDE.
On Wednesday afternoon, The New York Times broke the news that the “centrist” digital media site The Messenger would be shutting down operations that day after nine months in business.
Awkwardly, this was the first any of the staff at the news site heard about that, as outside media reporters were sent the email about the site’s closure from CEO Jamie Finkelstein before they were.
Via The Daily Beast:
Several sources told The Daily Beast that in the immediate moments after the news was first reported by the Times, employees still had not been informed that The Messenger was shutting down.
“I am not in the loop. Trying to find out now,” editor-in-chief Dan Wakeford wrote in the site’s general Slack at 3:57 p.m. ET.
Moments after that message was sent, sources added, the site’s Slack was taken down.
Workers soon found out that not only had they lost their jobs at the media startup, but that they would not be getting any severance.
“All I know is that if I were to launch a media start-up I'd be sure to rent an entire floor of a downtown Manhattan skyscraper that was 9/10ths empty all day ... and then fail to tell my employees they were laid off until they read about it in the New York Times,” now former-Messenger journalist Jordan Hoffman wrote on social media.
Jamie Finkelstein, the previous owner of The Hill, launched The Messenger this past March as a “centrist” news site — though his friendship with Donald Trump often put a damper on the whole “non-partisan” thing. While the site scrambled to cover literally every single news item every single day at a startlingly rapid pace, they were told to ignore Trump’s civil trial and to keep any unflattering articles about Trump out of the Most Popular section.
Finkelstein initially raised more than $50 million to start the site and went around telling people that it was going to rake in over $100 million a year despite relying on programmatic advertising — which now pays very very little — for funding. That did not happen. In fact, the site made only $3 million in 2023. Is that bad? Yes. That is bad.
Finkelstein’s editorial vision and judgment may not have been great, but it’s still scary as hell to see something like this happen, especially when …
2024 Has Already Been A Journalistic Bloodbath
Prior to The Messenger shuttering, 538 journalists had already lost their jobs in layoffs this year — so, January.
In the last month, dozens of layoffs were announced at outlets including NBC News, Time magazine, Business Insider and The Los Angeles Times — the last of which saw more than 100 employees cut. Pitchfork is also facing layoffs as it’s being folded into men’s magazine GQ, and Sports Illustrated is shedding a “significant reduction” of its 100-member workforce. Staffers at Condé Nast walked off the job over the company’s plan to lay off staff.
Look, this isn’t just bad for journalists or those who work in media in general. This isn’t even just about jobs. This hurts everyone. The fact that we are going into an election year with a relatively malnourished and paywalled “liberal media” is not great.
I don’t think that we can just settle in and go, “Welp, I guess social media is going to replace journalism entirely! That’s just the way things are going!” — because that is legitimately dangerous. As much good as it can do in terms of getting important stories out there, it’s also way too easy to get things wrong and to spread misinformation. Even good, smart people can get things wrong sometimes or repost something that seems true but turns out not to be. We need our information to be better vetted than that.
Quite frankly, the Right is better organized than we are right now, in terms of being determined to get their message out there and give platforms and attention to people on their side. They also have A Lot of billionaires who are happy to spend their money buying them social media sites and news sites in hopes of controlling the information that people are exposed to on a daily basis.
I don’t know that I have the answer, but we’ve gotta do something or this is not going to end well.
A Union For Hyundai Workers? Nice!
More Perfect Union reports (in this video below) that 1000 workers at the Montgomery, Alabama, Hyundai plant — who make, on average, $10 less an hour than union auto workers — have signed union cards!
In addition to the low pay, workers at the Alabama plant report extremely dangerous working conditions, which the company does not do anything about (other than fire workers who get severely injured).
Thirty percent of workers have signed union cards, which is the threshold the National Labor Relations Board requires to make their push for unionization public. The goal is to get up to 70 percent and hope that the company will voluntarily accept a union (and if not, they must be allowed to hold an election). The Alabama plant is the third Hyundai plant to hit the 30 percent threshold, and 10,000 workers across 13 plants have so far signed union cards.
The UAW, in support, has released this video connecting Montgomery’s history of civil rights advocacy to the fight for unionization.
If successful, they will be the first US-based union in the company’s history. Hooray!
And Speaking Of UAW …
Donald Trump is losing his mind over Shawn Fain, calling the UAW leader a “weapon of mass destruction” after Fain endorsed President Joe Biden over him last week — which he could not possibly have been surprised by.
“Shawn Fain is a Weapon of Mass Destruction on Auto Workers and the Automobile Manufacturing Industry in the United States! Is he under contract to China, because they will be getting almost all of our ‘Car making’ Business within a very short period of time. All Autoworkers should VOTE FOR TRUMP. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump yarped on Truth Social, the social media site he literally created for himself.
To be clear here — Trump wants autoworkers to be mad at Shawn Fain for getting them more money. That is what he thinks they should be mad about. That he was good at his job.
HOW WAS HE SURPRISED!
You know what though? I think Trump should make that part of his bit. He should go around the country telling workers that he’s going to make sure that their bosses don’t give them raises or perhaps even encourage them to cut their pay. People love making less money!
And Now He’s Trying To Meet With The Teamsters. Maybe They Want Less Money? (Doesn’t Seem Likely!)
Trump wants so badly for unions to support him. Not because he actually cares about workers or supports unions in any capacity (in fact, he has a history of union busting both as president and as a private citizen), but because he wants to pretend to care about working class people.
On Wednesday, he met with the Teamsters (who meet with every presidential candidate at some point, though Nikki Haley has yet to respond to her invitation) and tried to woo them. It does not seem as though they were especially impressed, given the aforementioned history of union busting. Still, Trump tried to get their endorsement based on his plans to be really, really horrible to immigrants — which it turns out was not actually a big selling point for Teamsters leadership.
“We are all products of immigration, and the Teamsters union supports immigrant workers,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said.
Whoops!
Corporations have been gouging us since the pandemic
The world is not enough.