Sarah Anderson, Global Economy Director at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of inequality.org, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast to unpack a new report examining America's 20 largest low-wage employers and their central role in the nation's affordability crisis. Anderson argued that decades of deliberate wage suppression — not merely rising prices — are the root cause of working families' inability to afford basic necessities. She walked through data showing that at most of the 20 companies examined, median worker pay falls below the income thresholds for Medicaid and SNAP food assistance.
With CEO pay averaging $18.6 million across the group and stock buybacks siphoning billions that could be used to raise workers' wages, Anderson argued that taxpayers are effectively subsidizing the ultra-wealth of corporate executives. She outlined the policy tools, from CEO pay ratio taxes to federal legislation, that could begin to change that.
The conversation about affordability in America tends to focus on the cost side of the ledger: housing prices, grocery bills and gasoline. Sarah Anderson wants to redirect that conversation to the other side. The Global Economy Director at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of inequality.org joined America's Work Force Union Podcast to discuss a new report on America's 20 largest low-wage employers — and to make an argument that the affordability crisis is, at its core, a wage crisis decades in the making.
If wages had kept pace with rising worker productivity over the past 40 years, Anderson argued, the question of whether a full-time worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment or a trip to the grocery store would look very different. Instead, a small group of enormously profitable corporations built their business models around paying the minimum the market would bear — and workers, taxpayers and communities have been absorbing the cost ever since.
The report zeroes in on 20 companies, most of which are household names: Walmart, Amazon, Starbucks, Chipotle, Target, Home Depot and others that collectively employ millions of Americans. The findings are consistent across the group. At every one of the 20 companies, median worker pay falls below the income level required to afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the United States — a figure Anderson placed at roughly $59,000 annually. At 15 of the 20, the median pay falls below the Medicaid eligibility threshold for a family of three. At 13 of them, the median pay is below the SNAP food assistance limit for the same family size.
Walmart offers the starkest illustration. The nation's largest private sector employer, with 1.6 million workers, reported median pay of approximately $29,000 in 2024. Its chief executive received $27.4 million — 930 times the median worker's pay. In Nevada, the only state that publicly discloses employer-level Medicaid enrollment data, Walmart ranked as the top employer of Medicaid recipients, with roughly 29 percent of its Nevada workforce enrolled. In four states that disclose SNAP enrollment by employer — Colorado, Michigan, Massachusetts and Illinois — Walmart had more than 10,000 employees receiving food assistance.
The result, Anderson said, is that when corporations pay poverty wages, the public ends up picking up the tab for their workforce's basic needs. The workers relying on these programs, she noted, are getting up and working every day. The burden they place on public assistance rolls is a function of their employers’ pay decisions, not their own choices.
One of the central mechanisms driving the gap between executive and worker pay is the stock buyback — a practice Anderson described as a financial maneuver that has nothing to do with corporate performance and everything to do with enriching executives at the top. When companies repurchase their own shares, they reduce the supply of stock on the market, artificially inflating its value. Because most executive compensation is tied to stock-based pay, buybacks function as a direct transfer of wealth from the company's resources to its leadership.
The Home Depot example puts the scale in concrete terms. Over six years, the company spent approximately $38 billion on stock buybacks. Anderson calculated that the same sum, redirected to worker pay, would have been enough to give each of the company's roughly 419,000 employees a $15,000 bonus every year for the duration of that period. The money exists. The question is one of priorities — and at these companies, the priority has consistently been to concentrate wealth at the top.
Stock buybacks were considered illegal stock price manipulation until the Reagan administration legalized them as part of a broader policy package that Anderson said was designed to enrich corporate elites at the expense of workers. That same era brought steep cuts to the top marginal tax rate and an aggressive escalation of union busting, including the firing of striking air traffic controllers — a signal, she argued, that set the tone for decades of anti-worker corporate and government policy.
Two structural factors help explain why the companies on the list have been able to sustain poverty-wage business models for so long. The first is the absence of union representation. Every company on the list has actively resisted organizing efforts. Amazon workers at a Staten Island facility won a union election four years ago and still do not have a contract. Starbucks workers have voted to unionize at roughly 500 to 600 stores over the same period with the same result. This proves that companies with enough resources to outlast organizing campaigns and enough political influence to block legislative remedies have been able to indefinitely postpone union organizing efforts, Anderson said.
The second factor is the federal minimum wage, which has remained at $7.25 an hour — a figure Anderson called a joke given today's cost of living. Approximately 20 states still default to the federal floor. While states including Washington and California, and several cities, have moved on their own to raise the minimum wage, the absence of a federal standard leaves a significant share of the country's lowest-paid workers without even a baseline increase. Anderson said the concentration of wealth at the top of these corporations is precisely what gives them the political power to block reforms like a federal minimum wage increase or stronger labor rights enforcement.
With federal action largely stalled, Anderson pointed to local and state governments as the most active front in the fight against excessive pay gaps. Portland, Ore., has operated a surtax on CEO-to-worker pay ratios for roughly six years. Companies operating in the city — including those with branches or stores there — pay a surtax on local profits if their CEO-to-worker pay ratio exceeds 100 to 1. The revenue has gone to social programs, and the predicted exodus of corporations from the city has not materialized.
Active campaigns are underway in both San Francisco and Los Angeles to expand or introduce ratio-based surtaxes this year, driven in part by budget pressures from federal reductions in social service spending. Anderson also noted that New Jersey's new governor has proposed a fee on companies with large numbers of employees enrolled in Medicaid — a direct attempt to make corporations financially accountable for the public assistance costs their pay practices generate.
At the federal level, Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation called the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, and separate legislation from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse takes a similar approach with a different design. Polling consistently shows the concept is popular across party lines, Anderson said. She cited research indicating that most Americans believe the CEO-to-worker pay gap is far smaller than it actually is — and that when asked what an ideal ratio would look like, the typical answer is around 7 to 1, far below even the 100 to 1 threshold used in the Portland ordinance.
Anderson's closing message was a call for more local action. The federal legislative environment is difficult, but cities and states are demonstrating that meaningful intervention is possible — and that the corporate threat to relocate in response to higher taxes has repeatedly proved to be bluster rather than reality.
The full report is available at inequality.org, where a free weekly newsletter tracks inequality trends and the worker-led efforts to reverse them.
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