Like a good neighbor, Wal-Mart is there

Adrianne Shropshire

Like a good neighbor, Wal-Mart is there

Just when I thought Wal-Mart couldn't look any more desperate in its attempt to salvage its crumbling image. Yesterday the NY Times reported on the Wal-Mart Jobs and Opportunity Zones, an effort by Wal-Mart to "help" competitors in urban areas adjust to the presence of the local business killer. According to a report released last year by the Brennan Center for Justice the introduction of Wal-Mart into a community results in substantially reduced sales and market share for local businesses and we know from previous reports that this pressure leads to the outright disappearance of local mom-and-pop stores.

So the giant take-no-prisoners company is now going to offer assistance to those who would be destroyed in the form of direct grants, seminars, and free advertising. There are at least two, maybe obvious, take-aways from this new program:

1. Perhaps the most obvious, is that there is nothing about improving job quality or opportunity as the name might suggest. So call them enterprise zones or business improvement zones. Wal-Mart could use these 50 zones that they are creating to experiment with increasing the wages and benefits of employees in their own stores or maybe agree to neutrality in a couple and see if their workers would like union representation. But this effort is about minimizing business opposition and discouraging the development of organized opposition like the Neighborhood Retail Alliance, not actually creating better jobs for these communities and expanding the number of good jobs available. And, of course, this is really about Wal-Mart not wanting to be accused of destroying minority-owned businesses which will bear the brunt of the impact of the giant entering "urban" markets. Which leads to my other point...

2. "Urban" areas with "high unemployment" and "high crime"? Well my-my, Wal-Mart, who on earth could you be referring to? I am disgusted to no end by this company trying to push their poverty-wage jobs on already poor communities of color and then looking for thank yous. The Brennan Center report also sites two other important stats, 1. communities experience jos loss, not gain, when Wal-Mart enters and, 2. poverty actually increases in communities when big-daddy arrives on the scene pimpin' his low-wage, no benefit jobs. I don't think that one of the policy solutions recommended for addressing the disconnection of Black men from the workforce was "increase the number of jobs that keep families in poverty".

So let's review. The any job is a good job strategy for reducing poverty can't possibly work and should be rejected at every turn by community members, local elected officials, clergy, and progressive-minded leaders everywhere. Our communities deserve better. We need to increase the standards and the expectations that we have for multi-national corporations that wish to do business in our neighborhoods.