Chicago Activists Push for Living Wage
Posted on July 24, 2006 by webteam
From the Chicago Tribune:
On one side is one of the city’s biggest and fast-growing industries–retailers, which employ about 250,000 workers in Chicago–and their Wal-Mart-led allies. On the other is organized labor and a broad coalition of neighborhood and advocacy groups. Both sides predict a close vote, and a legal challenge is all but certain. “If it becomes law we will end up in the courthouse,” said David Vite, president and chief executive of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association.
The proposed “big-box” ordinance covering stores of 90,000 square feet and up with gross annual sales across the region of $1 billion would affect 42 Chicago outlets employing about7,500 people, according to the retail association. They range from Wal-Mart, Target and Home Depot to Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom and Sak’s.
The debate is being framed for maximum emotional impact, forcing council members to choose in an election year between constituents’ calls for wages that lift working people out of poverty and retailers’ promises to bring jobs to neighborhoods with double-digit unemployment.
“Retailers are never going to love this law,” said economist Annette Bernhardt, deputy director of Brennan Center’s poverty program. “The question is whether they can afford to live with it, and everything we know about the economics of the industry and Chicago says they can.”
Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. called Daley recently, prompting speculation that Scott asked the mayor to consider vetoing the ordinance if it is passed. A spokeswoman for Daley’s office declined to comment on a private conversation.
Wal-Mart, the country’s biggest grocer, has had little presence in Chicago’s grocery market but is preparing a big push over the next three years.
Seeds for the coalition were planted two years ago when the City Council approved Wal-Mart’s request to build a store on the West Side, its first in Chicago, while narrowly denying its bid for a South Side outlet.
Within two months of the votes, Local 881 had joined Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and other community-based advocates to introduce Chicago’s big-box ordinance. Their template was Costco, a big-box store that offered $10 per hour starting wages to employees at a North Side store.
Rather than painting a bull’s-eye on Wal-Mart, the ordinance targets employers in an industry where the median wage for sales associates is $9.43 per hour in Chicago, or $19,611 a year, according to the Brennan Center.
- Click here to learn more about the Chicago living wage debate.
- Click here to visit the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).
