Adrianne Shropshire

Chicago’s Big Box Living Wage Vote

Today in Chicago the big showdown between Wal-Mart and their allies, and community and labor advocates will play itself out as the Chicago City Council votes on a proposed ordinance that will lift the wages of workers in large retail businesses in the city. The vote is important not just for workers in Chicago but has real and potentially huge implications for communities across the county. We could see a landmark policy decision today that expands the scope of living wage laws beyond city employees and contractors and transforms it into one that can be used to create standards in industries, like retail, that continue to drag down the economic reality of working people.

The vote is also important because the battle over the public's opinion has laid out, pretty plainly, the contrasting arguments that have shaped the debate around Wal-Mart and its new urban agenda. For Wal-Mart and their allies the arguments have essentially been:

1. We/You need jobs
2. We/You need places to shop in our community that are affordable
3. If you make us pay living wages we'll pack up our smiley face and cheap underwear and go someplace else
4. We can't afford to pay more

The first two arguments are serious and can't be taken lightly. With the release last year of the Community Service Society's report on the disconnect between Black males and the workforce in NYC and more recent reports that place a national perspective on this grim reality, we need real initiatives to address the fundamental problems underlying this issue. I'm pretty sure that Wal-Mart, by itself, is not one of those solutions. However, simply dismissing the crisis level economic chaos in the African American community is offensive and smacks of the elitism we often find in progressive circles. But accepting the trick bag of false choices that leaves us with affordable goods and services and a continuing cycle of poverty because of low-wage jobs is equally offensive. In the aftermath of the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles there was a loud cry for jobs and services in South LA. The response from the development world was, "take what you can get 'cause no one wants to come here". When confronted with a large and well resourced corporate entity called Rebuild LA, South LA residents decided not to just accept whatever was on the table but instead to create a set of "development standards" that they forced RLA to adopt as the framework for any development deals. Since then, community developers who were part of the process have been successful at brining in businesses, including the big boxes clamoring for inner city dollars, all while holding true to the community-developed standards. Negotiating from a position of desperation will never get us what we need.

The last two arguments are not serious and can be taken lightly. The market dictates that Wal-Mart and others open up this new front. There's no other place for them to go. Inner city markets like chicago's represent disproportionate consumer purchasing power. It's a cash cow, if Wal-Mart doesn't make the money someone else will and they know this. And the nonsense about going broke is insulting. Wal-Mart pays the $9.50 required by Santa Fe, New Mexico's living wage ordinance and they are not going broke or closing shop. In fact they are opening a new super center.

So I agree with my friend and colleague Mark Winston Griffith when he says that "progressives must go there". The "there" in this case is to the land of real solutions for the problems that plague inner city neighborhoods. For the left to continue being nothing more than the loyal opposition is tired. Expanding living wage is a real and proactive policy solution. Chicago should embrace it, NYC should embrace it, Philly should embrace it, LA should embrace it, and on and on 'til the break of a new dawn...

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Posted at 11:40 AM, Jul 26, 2006 in Wal-Mart
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