Trailers line a loading dock at an Amazon facility at Baltimore/Washington International airport, Oct. 24, 2019, in Baltimore.
The authors of the latest study — Ellora Derenoncourt of Berkeley and Clemens Noelke and David Weil of Brandeis — studied Amazon, Walmart and Target, which operate in areas where wages tend to be low. But even in those places, the researchers found, wage increases by the large corporate employers appear to drive up wages without driving down employment.
Many restaurants will grant the pay increase, Darden said, but at the cost of giving workers fewer hours or hiring fewer employees — a common contention among small-business owners. But while that may be true in individual cases, the Berkeley and Brandeis researchers found little evidence of broad-based job cuts as wages rose. A 10% increase in the base wage at a company like Amazon, they found, translated into a 1.7% loss in local jobs — and a 0.4% loss in jobs for low-wage workers.
Dube said that in the 1980s, the spread of Walmart and other national retailers helped push down wages, as they displaced smaller, often unionized local chains. Now big national retailers seem to be helping to push wages up.Tad Mollnhauer, who runs two printing and shipping retail stores near Orlando, Florida, said entry-level workers typically earned about $10 to $12 an hour. But these days, anyone paying that rate risks losing workers to Amazon.
“There’s just no way to be sure to reach the tens of millions of hardworking but poorly paid workers without significantly raising the national minimum wage,” he said. Other business groups accused Amazon of using its scale and political influence to squeeze smaller competitors.