The numbers land with an almost statistical cruelty. The number of Amazon workers relying on food stamps has nearly tripled since 2020, federal auditors found, even as the company’s annual profit grew to $77.7 billion from $11.6 billion over the same stretch. The juxtaposition is the story of the wider American economy in miniature: working people are now taking home the smallest slice of national output ever recorded, while the market overhead has never been fatter.
The scale is historic. American workers’ share of economic output has fallen to 52.8% — the lowest reading since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping the measure in 1947. Meanwhile the S&P 500 has climbed 600% since the turn of the century; over the same period, inflation-adjusted wages have risen a mere 12.5%. Corporations are collecting record cash, and the people doing the work are collecting a shrinking fraction of it.
The Amazon Case
A Government Accountability Office report covering 11 states found 12,346 Amazon employees on SNAP, the food-stamp program, and another 11,338 on Medicaid — nearly triple the count in the watchdog’s 2020 review. Amazon’s 2025 revenue, for context, jumped 12% in a year to a record $717 billion, up from $638 billion. Walmart and FedEx logged similar growth in the count of workers needing federal assistance, and so did ride-share and delivery platforms.
Amazon spokesperson Rachael Lighty called the conclusion drawn from the GAO data “wrong,” arguing raw numbers mislead because the company’s headcount has grown so much. Amazon pay is among the industry’s best, she said, with full-time staff getting health coverage from day one and 74% enrolled in a company plan against a 65% private-sector take-up rate. She added a dare to competitors: “We challenge other large retailers to provide the same Day 1 comprehensive health care benefits that we do.”
GAO’s Kathryn Larin sees a harder story in the figures: most SNAP recipients today are working, often full-time, in households earning under about 130% of the poverty line. “What this analysis really points to is the large number of people who have very low incomes and continue to have very low income,” she said. “I mean, these are families that are really barely able to make ends meet, and yet they are working, and they are working a lot.”
How The Share Unraveled
KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk has tracked the divergence in cold ratios: corporate profits’ slice of U.S. GDP has climbed from 8% to 15.85%, while employee compensation has slid from 66.6% to 61.9%, across the years since 1982. The trend chart, she wrote in February, still haunts her: “Inequality fuels social and economic instability.”
MIT Sloan’s Anna Stansbury traces the slide across roughly half a century. Union representation stood at 20.1% of American workers in 1983, against only 10.0% by 2025, she notes, weakening wage bargaining. The deeper force, in her telling, is workplace fissuring: banks and retailers contracting out security, cleaning, and delivery once done by direct employees — shedding benefit obligations and liability along the way. “in more and more cases, that’s not actually people’s experience of the workplace, particularly in lower middle-income jobs,” she said.
Artificial intelligence now looms over the debate. University of Chicago economist Brent Neiman, writing in a New York Times op-ed, called AI’s productivity promise the greatest threat to wages: “Anyone who has used ChatGPT can see how much work now done by people could soon be done by technology,” he wrote. Apollo’s Torsten Slok, in a July white paper with Sania Edlich, found that across 321 occupations, jobs highly exposed to AI saw real wage growth fall 6.7% after 2023 even as employment held — productivity gains pocketed, wages held flat.
Whether the trend is cyclical or permanent is the trillion-dollar question. Stansbury allows that steadier inflation and a tight labor market could still lift workers’ share back up. “If those two things happen and the labor share continues to fall,” she said, “then it would suggest that there’s actually been a secular shift, a secular acceleration in the downward trend.” For the 12,346 Amazon workers on food stamps, the distinction is academic. The squeeze, for now, is simply the job.
