These studies examine the effect of big-box chains, particularly Wal-Mart, on wages and benefits for retail employees.

A Downward Push: The Impact of Wal-Mart Stores on Retail Wages and Benefits
Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester, and Barry Eidlin
UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, Dec. 2007

This study analyzes the impact of the opening of Wal-Mart stores on the earnings of retail workers. (It uses a similar technique to account for possible biases in Wal-Mart's store location decisions as the study described in the Retail Employment section, "The Effects of Wal-Mart on Local Labor Markets.") This study focuses on stores that opened between 1992 and 2000 and concludes, "Opening a single Wal-Mart store lowers the average retail wage in the surrounding county between 0.5 and 0.9 percent." Not only did Wal-Mart lower average wage rates, but "every new Wal-Mart in a county reduced the combined or aggregate earnings of retail workers by around 1.5 percent." Because this number is higher than the reduction in average wages, it indicates that Wal-Mart not only lowered pay rates, but also reduced the total number of retail jobs. The study goes on to look at the cumulative impact of Wal-Mart store openings on retail earnings at the state level and nationwide. "At the national level, our study concludes that in 2000, total earnings of retail workers nationwide were reduced by $4.5 billion due to Wal-Mart’s presence," the researchers find. Most of these losses were concentrated in metropolitan areas. Although Wal-Mart is often associated with rural areas, three-quarters of the stores it built in the 1990s were in metropolitan counties.

What Do We Know About Wal-Mart?
By Annette Bernhardt, Anmol Chaddha, and Siobh√°n McGrath Brennan Center for Justice, August 2005

This scrupulously fact-checked and footnoted report outlines what we know about Wal-Mart, in terms of its wages, health insurance benefits, compliance with labor laws, and cost to states. It details average starting wages for various job classifications. It reports that Wal-Mart employees earn 20 percent less than retail workers on average. It outlines the out-of-pocket costs, coverage limitations, and eligibility requirements for the retailer's health insurance plan, and compiles information on what various states are spending to provide Medicaid to uninsured Wal-Mart employees and their children. The report also summarizes Wal-Mart's record of labor law violations.

Reviewing and Revising Wal-Mart's Benefits Strategy
Memo to the Wal-Mart Board of Directors from Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart's executive vice president for benefits, Oct. 2005

This internal memo leaked to Wal-Mart Watch assesses Wal-Mart's current health care benefits and offers strategies to both reduce the company's health insurance costs and neutralize criticism of its employment practices. The memo reports that only 48 percent of the company's employees are enrolled in its insurance plan, compared to an average of 68 percent for national employers. Excessive out-of-pocket costs, including expensive premiums and high deductibles, are to blame. "Our coverage is expensive for low-income families, and Wal-Mart has a significant percentage of Associates and their children on public assistance," the memo notes. Employees enrolled in Wal-Mart's insurance plan spend an average of 8 percent of their income on health care, nearly twice the national average. Almost 40 percent spend more than 16 percent of their income, a crippling cost for workers who earn less than $20,000 a year on average. The memo also reports that Wal-Mart has a larger share of its employees and their children enrolled in Medicaid compared to other companies. "In total, 46 percent of Associates' children are either on Medicaid or are uninsured," it notes. The memo offers strategies for reducing Wal-Mart's health care costs, including increasing the percentage of part-time employees and "design[ing] all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart gathering)." The latter recommendation aims to "dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart."

The Impact of Big Box Grocers on Southern California: Jobs, Wages, and Municipal Finances [PDF]
Prepared for the Orange County Business Council by Dr. Marlon Boarnet of the University of California at Irvine and Dr. Randall Crane of the University of California at Los Angeles, 1999.

The most useful parts of this study deal with Wal-Mart's impact on wages. The study concluded that, as Wal-Mart builds supercenters in southern California, the company will absorb up to 20 percent of the region's grocery market and cut grocery workers' income by up to $1.4 billion annually. Unionized supermarket workers in southern California make the equivalent of $18.25 an hour in wages and benefits, according to the study, while Wal-Mart employees earn just $9.63 per hour. As Wal-Mart expands in the region, it will replace high-wage jobs with low-wage jobs. It will probably also force unionized supermarket workers to accept substantial wage and benefit cuts to keep their employers competitive. The combined losses are estimated in the range of $500 million to $1.4 billion. The study also compares health insurance benefits at unionized supermarkets and Wal-Mart, and examines the tax and revenue implications of supercenter development.

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