On
Thursday, the US-based logistics and delivery company UPS announced a
quarterly dividend payout to shareholders of more than $700 million
for the three months to August 2018. The announcement came the very
same day as the Teamsters union met in Chicago, Illinois to endorse
new contracts for UPS workers that enforce poverty-level wages and
introduce major new concessions.
UPS’s
dividend payout is an object lesson in the basic functioning of
capitalism. Where does this $700 million come from? It did not, after
all, arise out of thin air. It is extracted from the labor of
hundreds of thousands of workers, in the US and internationally. It
is part of the surplus value produced by these workers—the
difference between the wages they earn by selling their labor power,
barely enough to survive, and the value they add in the process of
production and distribution.
The
beneficiaries of this process of exploitation are not only the
corporate executives that run UPS, but the major institutional
investors and super-rich that own UPS stock. The largest UPS
shareowners include the hedge funds Vanguard Group (which will
receive $46 million), Blackrock ($36 million) and State Street
Corporation ($24 million). These hedge funds then distribute their
“earnings” to the financial parasites and billionaires that
manage and invest in them.
For
his part, UPS’s CEO David Abney, who controls over 200,000 shares,
will add another $180,000 to his 2017 compensation of more than $14
million.
Assuming
similar payments to investors for the rest of the year, UPS’s 2018
dividend payout of $2.8 billion would be enough to give each of the
quarter-million workers at UPS an immediate raise of more than
$11,000—almost doubling the annual salary of a part-time warehouse
worker on $10 an hour and 25 hours a week. It would take such a
worker 1,000 years to make what UPS CEO Abney was paid in 2017.
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