The marked contrast between Amazon's and Sears' compensation plans shows the shift in recent years away from employees to shareholders
New York Times : Tweets: @mims , @nytnational , @byrosenberg , @kyweise , @byrosenberg , @nytimesbusiness , @sapna , @tiffkhsu , and @tomgara Tweets: Christopher Mims / @mims : Workers build companies like Amazon but do not own them. Sears was different. http://www.nytimes.com/... http://twitter.com/... @nytnational : Amazon, which changed how Americans shop much as Sears did in its prime, does not disclose what percentage of its stock is owned by employees. But this month, Amazon stopped giving stock to hundreds of thousands of employees. http://www.nytimes.com/... Mike Rosenberg / @byrosenberg : When Sears was America's retail giant, its employees got retirement benefits worth $2,744/year in today's dollars + 25% of all company stock. Today's retail giant, Amazon, gives $680 in retirement benefits + just got rid of stock for most employees http://www.nytimes.com/... Karen Weise / @kyweise : “Amazon shareholders have benefited more than workers, but Sears, in its heyday, tried to serve both.” @NelsonSchwartz @mcorkery5 master class on the changing nature of employment and shareholder capitalism https://www.nytimes.com/... Mike Rosenberg / @byrosenberg : A source of wealth inequality that doesn't get talked about much: Only 20% of employees making under $30K get profit sharing (far less than higher-paid workers). Their bonus has dropped from $920 to $300 in the past decade. It didn't use to be this way: https://www.nytimes.com/... pic.twitter.com/clDBjaUIG5 @nytimesbusiness : Half a century ago, salesmen at Sears could walk out the door at retirement with a nest egg of what would translate today to well over $1 million. People who join Amazon now as warehouse workers would leave with a fraction of that. https://nyti.ms/2D2dC9P Sapna Maheshwari / @sapna : brilliant story comparing how workers at Amazon are paid today vs. Sears in its heyday & what that says about corporate America + income inequality https://www.nytimes.com/... by @NelsonSchwartz + @mcorkery5 Tiffany Hsu / @tiffkhsu : Sears is often called the Amazon of the Gilded Age. But it shared its success with employees in a far more generous and lasting way than Amazon does. https://nyti.ms/2RcQjgN @NelsonSchwartz @mcorkery5 Tom Gara / @tomgara : “If Amazon's 575,000 total employees owned the same proportion of their employer's stock as the Sears workers did in the 1950s, they would each own shares worth $381,000.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands three weeks into a fight over how Amazon pays its warehouse workforce: the company had just raised hourly pay to $15 while eliminating monthly bonuses and stock awards for US fulfillment workers, drawing direct questioning from Sen. Bernie Sanders about whether total compensation actually rose. The Times reporters frame that move against Sears, which historically gave employees a significant portion of company stock plus generous retirement benefits — two retail giants at different points in the same arc.
The contrast matters because Amazon does not disclose what share of its stock employees own, and it has since become the reference point for other employers: by late 2021 it was acting as the de facto wage-and-benefit setter for US companies competing for workers. What Amazon chooses to pay in cash versus grant in equity ripples across the low-wage labor market.
First-order effects
- Hundreds of thousands of hourly Amazon workers lose access to stock appreciation entirely, leaving their upside capped at the $15 wage while shareholders retain full claim on equity gains.
- Amazon must defend its 'total compensation rose' framing against Sanders-style scrutiny, since the cash raise replaced rather than supplemented bonuses and vesting awards.
Second-order effects
- Competing retailers and logistics employers benchmark against Amazon's cash-wage floor, accelerating a market-wide shift toward hourly pay set by Amazon rather than locally negotiated packages that include equity.
- Warehouse-heavy regions like Campbellsville, KY — where Amazon is the largest private employer — see local wealth-building tied to wages alone, with no employee ownership channel to offset that dependence.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large employers converge on a shareholder-first compensation structure: workers as cash-paid labor, equity reserved for investors — a reversal of the Sears-era employee-ownership model that could invite political pressure on how 'total compensation' is defined and disclosed.
- The same management philosophy critics call 'Bezosism' — algorithmic performance extraction layered onto old systems — extends from scheduling and surveillance into the compensation structure itself, making equity-for-hourly-workers an outlier rather than a norm.
The trend: Large US employers are replacing broad-based employee ownership with cash wages set by the biggest player, shifting the employee-shareholder split decisively toward shareholders.