Labor/Low-Wages—
Eric Galatas, producer, Colorado News Connection, bureau of Public News Service.
The debate over the nation’s persistent affordability crisis has mostly focused on the rising costs of such essentials as housing, groceries, and health care. But a new report digs into the other side of that equation: low worker wages.
While companies such as Amazon, FedEx, Target, Home Depot, and Walmart are making their CEOs and shareholders richer, frontline workers are struggling.
Report author Sarah Anderson, global economy director at the Institute for Policy Studies, said many workers get paychecks so small they have to enroll in programs such as SNAP and Medicaid to get by. She said this low-wage business model amounts to a form of corporate welfare, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
“Twenty of the largest and most profitable corporations in this country are not paying their workers enough to meet basic necessities,” she said, “and many of them are having to rely on public assistance just to get by.”
All companies listed in the new report, “America’s 20 Largest Low-Wage Employers and the Affordability Crisis,” failed to pay workers enough to afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment. A year’s wages at seven companies on the list isn’t enough to pay the average price of a used car. Meanwhile, the average CEO’s pay topped $18 million.
These corporations are not keeping wages low because of tight profit margins. Between 2019 and 2024, companies spent a combined $260 billion on share buybacks. Anderson said buybacks can temporarily increase stock values, which benefits executives and shareholders, but they do nothing for worker paychecks. In 2024 alone, the companies spent $32.5 billion on buybacks.
“If these companies had taken the money that they put into stock buybacks and put it into worker pay,” she said, “they could have lifted a million workers up to the level that you would need to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment.”
Anderson said there are tools available to lawmakers to help workers, including raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Lawmakers can also strengthen workers’ rights to unionize and hold companies accountable for unfair labor practices, she said.
“Companies have been using all kinds of aggressive tactics to undercut the interest among their employees in forming unions,” she added, “so they can bargain collectively and get a fairer reward for all the labor that they put into these companies.”
