Surprise! UPS's CEO Is A Big Republican Donor

Carol Tomé, who positioned herself as a friend of workers when she took the helm at UPS, is facing a potential strike by her workforce.

by Daniel Boguslaw, The Intercept

In a 2021 interview with the New York Times, UPS CEO Carol Tomé made a striking claim: She no longer believed in the godfather of trickle-down economics. “For a long time, I was sort of a Milton Friedman person: ‘The purpose of the corporation is to create value for the shareholder.’ I’m very much now of the belief that if you take care of the needs of all stakeholders, you actually create value for the share price. And taking care of the needs of all the stakeholders includes your employees.”

The change of heart was a remarkable admission for a C-suite executive who had paid little public attention to the question of workers rights during her two decades as a leader in corporate America. Yet even as Tomé positioned herself as a friend of the workers who make her company run, she continued to donate money to national Republicans set on gutting worker power and maximizing salaries for America’s top earners.

Tomé has donated over $70,000 in the past decade to national politicians and committees set on rolling back union protections, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission. While Tomé has also made donations in recent years to Democratic candidates like Stacey Abrams and the voting rights group Fair Fight PAC, those contributions represent just a small fraction of her overall political giving — and she has made far bigger donations to politicians who are weakening voting rights in Georgia, where UPS is headquartered.