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FedEx is investing all of its $385.7 million in tax savings in workers and job creation.
- Billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones cofounded the nonprofit JUST Capital in 2013 to measure what Americans want from corporations, and which of these companies are contributing to a "more just" society.
- President Donald Trump's tax plan is set to save the 1,000 largest American companies $150 billion.
- JUST has analyzed 120 of these companies, whose savings account for about one third of that $150 billion, and found that only about 6% of the windfall is going toward wages that aren't one-time bonuses.
- JUST has, however, highlighted 15 companies that are using the opportunity to invest in their
employees and communities, including Boeing, FedEx, JPMorgan Chase, and Apple. - This post is part of Business Insider's ongoing series on Better Capitalism.
After Congress passed the Republican tax plan in December, President Donald Trump said it was "above all else a jobs bill" that would create new American jobs and raise wages across the country.
As part of the bill, the corporate tax rate was drastically reduced from 35% to 21%, for an estimated $1 trillion in corporate savings over the next decade.
And while the cut has created jobs and boosted wages at some American companies, investor Paul Tudor Jones' nonprofit JUST Capital found that only about 20% of the windfall is going toward job creation, and 6% is going toward workers. A a full 57% is going to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks, dividends, or retained earnings.
JUST told Business Insider that while the overall picture can look disheartening, there are companies like Boeing and JPMorgan Chase that are using their tax savings to create long-term value rather than only boost their stock price.
Throughout the year, JUST has been tracking how companies in the Russell 1000 spend their tax savings. It measures that spending across seven categories. Using a 2017 survey of 4,100 Americans, JUST found that Americans rank, in order from highest to least importance, a company's behavior regarding: workers, customers, products, environment, communities, jobs, and management and shareholders.
JUST has created a ranking of the companies that have reported their spending, where each of the seven categories is weighted for its perceived importance (e.g. savings spent on workers is weighed more heavily than the same percentage of savings spent on communities).
JUST's research director Rob Du Boff explained to us: "The percentages are based on our estimate of potential tax savings (based largely on what they were paying in the prior three years) and our estimate of the incremental spending programs (for this reason, accelerated pension plan contributions don't count because that is just a payment toward a pre-existing liability). There is certainly some guesswork, but we already have a rich set of data from our prior wage and tax work to make educated guesses."
The ranking is ordered by quartile, and we've highlighted the 15 companies that are in the top half of the top quartile. Because of the many variables at play, these 15 companies are not rated 1-15, but "should be considered equals," according to Du Boff.
As of this writing, JUST has analyzed 121 of the Russell 1000 companies, but they also account for about one-third of the index's total value. You can find the full rankings, updated weekly, as well as the full methodology, at JUST's website.
Get the latest Boeing stock price here.