Walmart, Amazon and CPS top list of employers where Illinois workers still need SNAP benefits

On top of her responsibilities as a public school lunchroom porter — lugging heavy boxes of fruit, inventory checks, cleaning floors — Amy Mendez also finds herself consoling hungry little kids.

“Sometimes they don’t want the food, so they cry,” said Mendez, known as “Ms. Amy” in the lunchroom. “I have to find something because I don’t like when they go home and they [haven’t] eaten anything.”

After work, Mendez then navigates how to keep herself and her 13-year-old son fed. Mendez works a full-time schedule, but Chicago Public Schools doesn’t pay her for some of the days there are no classes or during the 12-week summer break. At $18.42 an hour, she’s among the school district’s lowest paid staffers.

To stock her refrigerator with eggs, milk and protein drinks, Mendez gets $100 each month from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, the government program that provides food benefits to low-income households across the country.

Among the people in Chicago living in SNAP households who are 22 or older, she is among the 47% who are employed but still need government support to help buy groceries, according to 2024 U.S. Census data analyzed by WBEZ.

This month marked the expansion of work rules that are part of President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill approved by Congress last summer. For Illinois, it’s the first time since March 2020 that all SNAP recipients deemed “able-bodied adults” will have to abide by work rules. The state had previously received a waiver because its unemployment rate was above the national average. Recipients must work or volunteer at least 80 hours a month if they don’t receive an exemption.

An analysis by the Chicago Sun-Times identified the top ten employers statewide with workers who receive SNAP food assistance. Chicago Public Schools, which employs about 60,000 workers, stands out as the lone public body among the list of large, profitable and mostly publicly traded corporations like Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s and FedEx whose chief executive officers get paid as much as tens of millions of dollars each year. The school district is among the state’s largest single employers.

Home care agencies top the list. Help At Home had the most workers — about 5,700 — who received food assistance. Addus, another home care agency, employed more than 3,700 people who needed SNAP benefits, making it the third largest employer.

Also listed are the Jewel-Osco grocery chain, Casey’s convenience store chain and Illinois-based Walgreens.

Company names were provided by the Illinois Department of Human Services, which reported the names as provided by SNAP recipients at enrollment. The state, which released the list from December under the state’s public records law, said it “does not track whether a recipient is employed full time or part time,” or how many hours they work per week, though many recipients reported having part-time or seasonal jobs. Officials also do not edit the employer names as submitted.

Amazon — whose founder Jeff Bezos is ranked by Forbes magazine as the fourth richest person on earth — is offering delivery drivers in Chicago between $22 and $24 an hour in listings on Indeed.com.

Amazon says it does not track how many employees receive SNAP benefits, and said the issue of who has to use food assistance depends on the household makeup more than wages.

“Amazon pay is among the best in the industry — well over double the federal minimum wage and significantly more than other retailers. It's inaccurate to focus on pay alone since SNAP eligibility is based on total household income and size — and not individual wages,” Eileen Hards, an Amazon spokesperson, said in an email.

That’s not how former Amazon employee Ash’Shura Brooks sees it.

“I helped keep one of the largest companies in the world running. And yet, like many Amazon drivers, I still had to rely on [SNAP] to feed my family,” said Brooks, 30, who is part of an effort to unionize Amazon workers.

Brooks applied to work for Amazon in Skokie because she thought it would provide her with a set amount of hours. But once she started working, her scheduling was often irregular. She needed to hold onto her SNAP benefits to provide enough food for herself and her son.

“That contradiction is exactly why I’m organizing,” Brooks said. “So, like this movement, it isn’t about laziness or a lack of effort, it’s really about dignity, fairness and making sure the people who do the work can actually survive off the work that we do.”

In Illinois, about 3,400 people who receive SNAP benefits report working for Amazon. It employs 39,500 full-time and part-time employees across Illinois, according to the company.

But Brooks says she was let go just as she and her colleagues were working to organize their workplace. She remains active in unionization efforts.

In Chicago, McDonald’s “crew member” jobs advertised between $16.20 and $19.89 an hour, and shift managers were offered a few dollars more. The Chicago-based McDonald’s told investors in December it had paid $4.9 billion in stock dividends in 2024, and total compensation for its CEO was $18.1 million.

Ads show that store jobs at Walmart — where CEO compensation topped $27 million — start in the $16-20 hourly range.

Most of the other top ten companies declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests from the Sun-Times.

Profile of a SNAP worker

People who are employed but also need to rely on SNAP, like Brooks and Mendez, often fit a certain work profile.

Their incomes are relatively low, making them eligible for the help — the monthly household income for a family of four has to be under about $4,400 or roughly $53,000 a year — and they are clustered in certain occupations.

The fields with the greatest percentages of Chicago workers living in households receiving SNAP include nursing and home health aides, childcare workers and personal care aides, and a category that covers janitors, housekeepers and groundskeepers, according to 2024 American Community Survey Census data analyzed by WBEZ.

SNAP recipients, along with people on Medicaid public health insurance, also receive fewer pay increases and face more volatility than other workers, according to a 2018 analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington D.C-based research and policy organization.

Republicans said they pushed for the expanded rules that went into effect this month to get more SNAP recipients to work and to reduce what they called abuse of the program. A person who doesn’t meet the requirements can get benefits for only three months in a three-year period.

But work requirements can push people into temporary or part time work, said Hyeri Choi, an assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University, who has researched how these kinds of rules mean people enter a labor market without adequate skills to compete for good jobs.

“They are not getting enough work hours,” Choi said. “But also their work schedules vary a lot, making [it] harder for them to make … work life balance or meet the child care responsibilities.”

Experts say these factors will make it harder for some to meet the expanded SNAP work rules, particularly for the groups who were exempt previously, including adults between 55 and 64 years old and parents with older teenagers. Exemptions apply to people who are unable to work and other groups, but the state is predicting about 400,000 Illinois residents of the 1.7 million receiving SNAP could lose their benefits by May 1.

‘The money is not enough’

Mendez, 35, has considered getting a better paying job, but she wants to be able to keep tabs on her son. His school is close to hers, with nearly the same schedule. She has no family here after moving from the Dominican Republic seven years ago.

“I always thought jobs paid well,” Mendez said in Spanish. “But no, I discovered that’s not the case and that it’s difficult to find work. Because honestly, I have wanted to leave but I can’t.”

She is among the lowest paid workers at CPS, according to UNITE HERE Local 1, which represents lunchroom workers. In a 2025 survey ahead of contract negotiations, the union found that about 22% of lunchroom workers received SNAP benefits and had visited food banks.

Ben Felton, CPS’ human resources chief, said CPS’ workforce is split into 46,000 full time workers, and another 14,000 part-time, seasonal and hourly workers, many of whom are CPS parents.

“It's not surprising, just by sheer numbers, that some of our employees on the low end of the pay scale in the distribution curve would be there,” he said. “CPS jobs often do align really well for working parents, because schedules mirror the school hours … A lot of times they want to do recess supervision, or that sort of work, because their kids are home and they get to pick them up. But those roles aren't always full time or year round.”

Wages have been rising at CPS, and with most workers in labor unions, all but a very few hourly workers earn more than minimum wage. A group of about 1,600 "miscellaneous workers” who monitor lunch and recess and work other jobs are seeking to join a different local union for higher pay.

Unlike the big corporations, CPS’ budget depends on taxpayer revenue.

“Candidly, we are operating [with] a huge structural budget deficit too,” Felton said. “So we're balancing the needs of our employees in our schools with the difficult financial position that CPS is in.”

Most CPS workers aren’t paid during summer breaks, so Mendez often goes back to the Dominican Republic to stay with her mom and save money. Even after school starts, her first paycheck doesn’t arrive for a few weeks because of how CPS payroll works.

During the school year, she is not paid for some days when children aren’t in the building. In January, her take home pay during one pay period was only $500.

“The money is not enough and I need more money to eat,” Mendez said. “The reason is because the check is not the same. I not only have to eat, I have to pay bills, car, gas, my house and that’s not enough.”

Her $100 monthly SNAP benefits usually last one trip to the grocery store where she stocks up on eggs, milk, rice, meat and fruit. On Fridays, she visits a community food pantry where she sometimes has to wait in line for more than 90 minutes because of how many others show up.

Mendez dreams of one day saving enough to buy her own home so her son can have a backyard. She would use the space to run her own daycare, using her associate’s degree in early childhood education.

“If I earn more money, it's fine if they take my [SNAP] because they can give it to … people who really need it,” she said. “But I don't want [them to] take off my [SNAP] now, in this moment, because I don't earn a lot of money.”

So for now, Mendez will continue to keep the lunchroom tidy and give hugs to the kids who look for her every day.

Contributing: WBEZ data projects editor Alden Loury.