SEATTLE, September 13 — Amazon’s annual revenue topped $574.8 billion in 2023, up from more than $500 billion a year earlier. The bottom line for investors is straightforward. The company’s scale keeps growing.
The share of that income going to the workers who generate it keeps shrinking. That tension is not new, and it is not unique to Amazon.
In the United States, the labor share of nonfarm business income fell from about 64% in the early 1980s to roughly 56% by the late 2010s, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Economists including Thomas Piketty, author of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (2013), and the International Monetary Fund have documented the same global trend, linking it to automation, globalization, and weakened labor bargaining power.
Record revenue, public assistance
A 2021 report from The Intercept put a finer point on the gap. Roughly one in ten Amazon employees in the United States — about 4,000 workers across nine states — received food stamps, or SNAP benefits, at some point between 2017 and 2019. That figure had tripled since 2014.
The same report noted that Amazon paid $0 in federal income tax in 2017 and 2018. The company’s starting wage was raised to $15 per hour in 2018 after pressure from Senator Bernie Sanders.
Amazon has said its workforce includes many part-time and seasonal employees. The pandemic sharpened the contrast. Amazon’s net income reached $21.3 billion in 2020 as lockdowns drove demand for delivery.
Warehouse workers faced heightened health risks during the same period, and in some cases relied on public aid.
What to watch
Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and headquartered in Seattle, now employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide. The figure that matters for policymakers is not the headcount or the revenue line. It is whether the labor share keeps sliding — and whether the public programs that backstop low-wage work become a permanent subsidy for the companies that rely on it.
