slantnosechevy;
You might want to question your broker, in that I believe UPS has been "less than 50% employee owned" since close to the time of the IPO. The thing to remember, however, is that, regardless of total "ownership" levels, the controlling "A" shares - which carry 10 times the voting rights of the "B" shares - are still safely held primarily in the hands of current employees and retired management.
As for the number of "unassigned" in management - and without having any actual figures myself - I find the number of 15,000 highly dubious, in that the TOTAL number of management employees is not radically above that figure, which one would assume would be floating around 50-60 thousand (at most, although someone might correct me)
I think a key there is that he "really wanted to know whats going on". I remember years back (well before the IPO) when I made the mistake of signing up for an invest class that included a "free consultation" with an investment broker, this broker pointing out that my UPS investment was in company that was "fine and dandy, but would never be as big as FedEx". Needless to say, I quickly lost confidence in his investment advice. As a side note, he called me up a short time later when another manager approached him about hypothecating [sp?] some shares; he had no idea of the stock share valuation, or loan value.
Anyway, if you work at UPS, and keep your ears and eyes open, I think you'd have at least as good a chance of knowing the facts about UPS as the run-of-the-mill broker. UPS is a company - what with the ownership control held by management and all, and being closely held until a short time ago - that a lot of brokers just don't seem to understand.