A growing number of Amazon and gig economy workers earn so little that they rely on public assistance to put food on the table and obtain health coverage, a Government Accountability Office study released Wednesday found.
The number of Amazon employees receiving food stamps and Medicaid in September nearly tripled since the GAO’s previous report in 2020, according to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who requested both analyses. Nearly 12,350 Amazon staffers were enrolled in food stamps and nearly 11,350 were covered by Medicaid in the states GAO examined.
Meanwhile, rideshare and food delivery companies are now among the top employers of recipients in the two safety net programs in several states, which was not the case five years earlier. Those companies include Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub and Instacart.
GAO analyzed data from 11 states where nearly one-fifth of Americans reside. It found that Walmart was one of the top employers of workers receiving these benefits in all the states examined, as it was in 2020. Meanwhile, the number of FedEx staffers on Medicaid more than tripled and on food stamps nearly double over the period.
“No one who works for a company making billions in profits should be living in poverty,” Sanders, who has long called out major corporations for not paying their workforce a living wage, said in a statement.
