<p>Cross-border e-commerce has fundamentally transformed how firms participate in international trade, yet its consequences for labor markets remain empirically underexplored, particularly in the context of policy-driven digital trade development. Exploiting the staggered rollout of China’s Cross-Border E-Commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zones (CBECPZs) as a quasi-natural experiment, this study provides causal evidence on how digital trade policy shapes employment quantity, employment composition, and wage inequality. Drawing on a difference-in-differences design applied to firm-level and city-level panel data spanning 2011–2021, we document a robust expansion in aggregate firm employment following policy adoption. This job creation is, however, accompanied by pronounced skill-biased restructuring: demand for high-skilled workers increases significantly while low-skilled employment contracts, consistent with skill-biased technological change. Mechanism analyses identify three distinct channels through which the CBECPZs policy expands employment scale, namely trade cost reduction, total factor productivity improvement, and enhanced entrepreneurial vitality, while digital transformation mediates the adjustment of employment structure. The distributional effects on wage inequality reflect a tension between market polarization forces and the compensatory institutional mechanisms embedded in the policy design. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that policy effects are more pronounced among non-state-owned enterprises, industries embedded in dense supply chain networks, and export-oriented cities, underscoring the centrality of organizational flexibility and regional openness in moderating policy effectiveness. These findings illuminate the dual and heterogeneous labor market consequences of cross-border e-commerce policies, with direct implications for designing more inclusive and forward-looking digital trade frameworks.</p>