the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Mar 16, 2026
The 20 companies with the lowest paid workers on average in the U.S. are Amazon, Autozone, Best Buy, Chipotle, Costco, Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, etc.), Dollar General, Dollar Tree, FedEx, Home Depot, Kroger, Lowe’s, MGM Resorts, O’Reilly Automotive, Ross stores, Starbucks, Target, TJX, Tyson Foods, and Walmart. These companies together have 6.7 million workers in the U.S., according to a recent investigation by the Institute for Policy Studies called “The Low-Wage 20.”
At 16 of these companies, half the workers are under the level to be eligible for Medicaid or SNAP food stamps for a single parent with two children. Walmart probably has almost half a million workers who are on Medicaid, and Amazon probably has far over half a million workers on Medicaid.
At half of these companies, median pay went DOWN between 2019 and 2024 when considering inflation. Meanwhile, their CEOs average 18.9 million dollars per year, each, which is 899 times the median workers’ pay!
These companies also spent 260 billion dollars from 2019 to 2024 to buy back their own stocks in order to inflate the stock prices to benefit their owners, which include 16 billionaires.