In a nutshell: Working at Amazon or being part of the gig economy certainly isn't fun. According to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), it's these jobs that have seen the number of people relying on food stamps and Medicaid explode over the last five years.
The GAO report, which was commissioned by Senator Bernie Sanders, shows that the number of Amazon workers relying on food stamps and Medicaid tripled between the start of the Covid pandemic in February 2020 and September 2025.
It's an equally depressing situation for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, GrubHub, and Instacart drivers. App-based food delivery and ride-hailing platforms are the number one category of work in which employees receive food stamps. Gig economy drivers also rank third when it comes to Medicaid representation. Five years ago, the category barely registered in the GAO's data.
Walmart topped both lists in 2020 and remains the company with the most employees using Medicaid, but while its share of beneficiaries has increased only slightly over the years, Amazon's has exploded.
The report included some findings about working adults who use these programs, taking data from the census and employment information from 11 states. It found that about two-thirds worked full time, most worked for private sector employers, and workers were largely in transportation, restaurants and food prep, and retail sales jobs. It was also noted that Some employers in selected states had thousands of beneficiaries on their payrolls.
The report also discovered that about 13.8 million working Americans in these states – Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Washington – were enrolled in Medicaid in 2024, up from 12 million in 2020, despite many working full time. There were also 10.6 million workers who relied on SNAP for groceries, up from 9 million in 2020.
Sanders says that taxpayers are subsidizing the starvation wages of large corporations like Walmart and Amazon, while the companies themselves are paying their CEOs exorbitant compensation packages and spending billions of dollars on stock buybacks to enrich their wealthy shareholders.
Amazon argues that the report is misleading as it looks at numbers rather than percentages, suggesting Amazon ranks high because it has so many employees. It also said that because Amazon is one of several employers that make part-time work an option, more of its workers might be eligible for Medicaid and SNAP.
DoorDash pointed to an in-house survey that found a third of workers said they did deliveries to avoid signing up for government benefits. Meanwhile, gig worker industry group Flex sang the praises of the industry and said many workers who might otherwise rely on government benefits can "turn to flexible work to bridge the gap."
Gig work might offer flexibility, but many workers pay for it through low wages, limited benefits, and financial insecurity. An Economic Policy Institute analysis found that 29% of those in the industry earned less than their state's minimum wage, while 14% made less than the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour. Almost one in five said they had gone hungry because they could not afford enough food, and 31% had been unable to pay their utility bills in full during the previous month.
Gig workers also lack many of the protections associated with conventional employment. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed that only 19.9% of contingent workers received employer-provided health insurance, compared with 51.2% of non-contingent workers. Platform work can bring physical risks, too: a Pew Research Center survey found that 35% of workers had felt unsafe while doing a job, while 19% reported experiencing an unwanted sexual advance.
