Alexa, get me a job

[Bloomberg] [Fully Charged]( From [Bloomberg](   [FOLLOW US [Facebook Share]]( [Twitter Share]( [SUBSCRIBE [Subscribe]](  Hi folks, it’s Brad. It hasn’t been a great time for Amazon.com Inc.’s self-proclaimed image as a munificent job creator. A vocal contingent of New Yorkers [don’t seem to want]( the company’s second headquarters in the city, while Amazon staff there have announced [plans to try to unionize]( . In Europe, workers are planning [more holiday strikes]( over poor working conditions. And in last Wednesday’s [season finale]( of South Park—that cultural barometer—Jeff Bezos is portrayed as a [telepathic evil genius]( out to enslave the local populace in a fulfillment center. “How can someone who gives you everything you want be a bad guy?” ponders Cartman. Amazon recently got some relief from all this negativity in the form [of a report]( , released last week by Morgan Stanley, that challenges the company’s developing reputation as a destroyer of jobs. The report examined 10 metropolitan areas where Amazon has at least five or more fulfillment centers and found that total job growth in those places outpaced the national average in the three years after the company’s arrival, primarily by catalyzing job growth in warehousing and transportation, fields adjacent to e-commerce. Morgan Stanley called it “job creation well above the national average,” even accounting for the conventional retail jobs that e-commerce inevitably displaces. It’s best to view Morgan Stanley’s numbers with a little skepticism. Amazon itself claims it has directly and indirectly created 1.7 million jobs around the world, without offering much in the way of explanation. (It currently employs more than 566,000 people.) On the other hand, advocates for local business, like the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in a report titled [Amazon’s Stranglehold]( , have charged the company with vaporizing more than 100,000 jobs in retail. I have a few issues with Morgan Stanley’s analysis. It’s crediting Amazon for job growth in warehousing and transportation, but lots of other industries intersect with those sectors and might be partly responsible. The report may also have an agenda—to assuage nervous investors as regulators prepare to take a deeper look at Amazon’s impact in 2019. Morgan Stanley concludes that its findings, as well as Amazon’s recent hike of its minimum wage to $15 an hour, might help it better “control the overarching regulatory narrative.” That said, the report does not totally sugarcoat Amazon’s effect. The authors worry that since transportation and warehousing segments are 75 percent male, while retail work is split evenly between men and women, Amazon might be inadvertently exacerbating gender inequality in the labor force. They also suggest that Amazon might be pulling away jobs from rural areas, where labor growth has been slower, by [consolidating opportunities around its metro operations](—a phenomenon my colleague Spencer Soper wrote about last year. Amazon’s overall economic impact is still poorly understood, with partisans on both sides offering competing sets of convenient data. The latest report from Morgan Stanley adds to the conversation, but it’s unlikely to be the last word. —[Brad Stone](mailto:bstone12@bloomberg.net)  And here’s what you need to know in global technology news Robinhood backtracked on its controversial checking product a day after unveiling the service. The startup scrubbed its website and promotional tweets, and said it'll [retool the product](. The service was initially pitched as a twist on banking, but questions immediately arose about whether deposits would be adequately insured—including [from the organization Robinhood said would insure them](.  Colin Kroll, the 34-year-old co-founder and chief of the quiz app HQ Trivia, was found dead in New York yesterday. Before helping create the viral app, [Kroll co-founded Vine]( and sold the short-form video startup to Twitter.  Google is the new Big Oil . At least for labor activists, who are now asking the search giant to [halt plans]( to launch a search engine in China, amid other demands.  Uber is on a peace-making tour ahead of its IPO. The company quietly resolved allegations last week that it put thousands of women at risk of sexual assault by their drivers. It follows several other recent settlements that should [reduce the company's legal risks when it goes public next year](.  A new report on Russia disinformation is designed to help U.S. lawmakers understand the scale of the threat. The Washington Post said it [obtained a copy of the report](, in which analysts inspected millions of posts provided by major technology companies and compiled their findings for the Senate Intelligence Committee.    You received this message because you are subscribed to the Bloomberg Technology newsletter Fully Charged. You can tell your friends to [sign up here](.  [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022