The People of Chicago vs. Wal-Mart
Urban Neoliberal Racism
and Civil Rights Sell Out by
Paul Street
It was just
too terribly perfect. For the first
time in his seventeen years as the Mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley found it
necessary last September to veto an ordinance by his normally obedient City
Council. The measure successfully moved to stamp out was widely supported by
rank and file citizens, community-based organizations, and labor unions in his
city’s black, Latino, and working-class wards. According to a poll conducted by
Lake Research Partners, 84 percent of the city’s residents and 90 percent of
its black residents supported the “big box” Living Wage bill.
Originally
passed by the council under pressure from a remarkable grassroots campaign, the
measure would have required giant retail corporations like Wal-Mart, Target,
Lowes, and Home Depot to pay workers in the city a modest minimum wage of ten
dollars an hour by 2010. The ordinance led leading retailers Wal-Mart and
Target to announce that they were putting a number of “big box” retail
developments in the city on hold. They
launched a preemptive capital strike, threatening to disinvest in the city
unless and until the popular ordinance was shelved and a “favorable business
climate” restored in the City of Big Shoulders.
“Mayor Soul
Man and Mayor Big Business on the Same Day”
In killing
this minimally decent measure, Daley made a special point of wrapping his
business-friendly veto in the purported flag of racial justice. He claims that it is necessary to permit
“economic development” in the city’s abandoned predominantly black ghetto
neighborhoods, where jobs and mass retail shopping opportunities are
notoriously scarce. He defended his
veto at a South Side gathering attended by a crowd of handpicked black
supporters and where he accused the ordinance’s proponents of opposing the “economic
development” for the black ghetto.
“Daley was Mayor Soul Man
and Mayor Big Business on the same day.”
This
performance has earned him the ironic praise of Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, who notes that “Mayor Daley is
a brilliant politician. Who else but Daley,” asks Kass, “facing his toughest
re-election fight from a credible black challenger, could play both the race
card and the free market card and get away with it? He was Mayor Soul Man and
Mayor Big Business on the same day” (John Kass, “Daley Shows He Still Holds All
the Cards,” Chicago Tribune, 14 September, 2006)
Propagating Preemptive
Capital Strike
Kass’s
sense of irony is not shared by the Tribune’s
reactionary editorial board and news chiefs. The paper has predictably applauded
the veto as a statement that “Chicago is still open for business, that it is
hungry for development and jobs for its citizens.” According to a “news” item in its business section, the Tribune informs readers that “it was a
fight that Wal-Mart needed to win.
Under pressure to show continuous growth and stumbling in international
markets,” the Tribune notes, “the
world’s largest retailer is attempting to win entry into cities like
Chicago. Until [Daley’s veto], it had
little to show for its effort. With
Mayor Daley’s successful veto of a higher minimum wage ordinance for big-box
retailers, the way is paved for Wal-Mart’s expansion to the city.” Like the
city’s other corporate newspaper the Sun
Times, the Tribune has been
arguing that the ordinance was a “bad idea” that would create huge job losses
for the city.
Divide and Rule
Richard
Daley the Second’s playing of the race card – quite disingenuous for reasons I
will discuss below – was straight out of Wal-Mart’s three-year campaign to
crack the Chicago market. Wal-Mart, a
notoriously low-wage, labor exploiting, and race-and gender-discriminating
template of low-road capitalism at home and abroad, has been trying to enter
the lucrative Chicago through the city’s weakest link – the desperately income,
job, and development poor black inner city.
It’s been posing as a concerned corporate citizen motivated by a
benevolent passion to solve the problems of the forgotten black ghetto. The
company and its allies in the Illinois Retail Merchants Association have gone
on black radio to trumpet this line.
They have cultivated loyal statements of support and hysterical
statements of concern for potential lost jobs from pathetic black corporate and
City Hall toadies like Leon Finney (of The Woodlawn Organization) and James
Compton, the malingering millionaire ex-CEO of the Chicago Urban League who has
finally made his long retirement from civil rights activism official. They have recruited the president of the
Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce to trumpet Wal-Mart et al.’s deep concern for
“future economic development in the city’s most underserved neighborhoods.”
Uncle Compton and the
Chicago Corporate Urban League
In one of
his last great acts of public subservience to white corporate power, Compton
last July sent all 50 city council members a letter in which he begged
Chicago aldermen to vote against the big box living wage ordinance. If the city dared to “mandate wages and
benefits” for Wal-Mart and its fellow mass retailers in Chicago, Compton
claimed, it would have a “negative impact on sales taxes and revenues” and a
“grave effect on Chicago residents and businesses.” The “long-term viability of
these stores,” Compton claimed, “is questionable with the passage of this
ordinance,” which he identified as an enemy of his supposed goal of creating
“balanced communities in which to live, work, and raise families”
“Inner-city residents
should be happy, the ‘civil rights leader’ counseled, with any kind of position, no matter how exploited and underpaid.”
In black ghetto neighborhoods where employment opportunities
were scarce, Compton told black aldermen, “all jobs are welcome.” Beggars, in other words, can't be
choosers. Inner-city residents should be happy, the “civil rights leader”
counseled, with any kind of position,
no matter how exploited and underpaid (James W. Compton, “From the President’s
Desk,” July 20, 2006, retrieved online on September 11, 2006 at www.cul-chicago.org).
There was
nothing in Compton’s letter about the need for a basic affordable housing
ordinance to make the city livable for the rising number of poor and ordinary
working people who are being forced out of the city’s highest opportunity
neighborhoods by the Mayor’s aggressively gentrifying “global city” agenda.
There was
nothing about Daley’s long record of neglecting economic development and social
health in the city’s many ghetto neighborhoods in favor of serving downtown and
multinational business interests (see below).
There was
nothing about the need for the kinds of jobs that provide the sorts of wages
and benefits that make “balanced communities” possible.
And
there was nothing, of course, about the role of Wal-Mart and other
low-wage mass retailers in the undermining of social and economic health across
the nation and the world.
Since he rarely if ever read his own agency’s reports and
publications, Compton was likely unaware that his agency’s venerable research
arm was on record in support of the big-box ordinance. I penned an argument in
support of a strong living wage ordinance for big-box retailers in a
Chicago Urban League (CUL) study published last year (see Working Poor Families in Chicago and the
Chicago Metropolitan Area [Northern Illinois University, Roosevelt
University, and The Chicago Urban League, 2005] at www.cul-chicago.org).
In a second
major Chicago Urban League report published the same year, I anticipated
Compton’s letter, observing that the paucity of economic development in
Chicago’s ghetto neighborhoods helps us understand why some black elites
“become excited…over the possibility that a notoriously low-wage retail employer
might set up shop in two black Chicago neighborhoods, one on the South Side and
the other on the West Side. The employer, Wal-Mart, had," I added,
"a long track record of worker abuse, race discrimination, and local
economic displacement, but company officials nonetheless claimed to be
interested in solving the ‘social ills of the inner city.’ Despite the
company’s questionable history and motives, many residents and community
leaders made efforts to accommodate its needs, with the hope that such investment
in their neighborhoods would translate into jobs and services. “Beggars can’t
be choosers” was the basic argument of black community leaders who pushed for
the zoning changes that the giant corporate employer (Wal-Mart) needed in order
to construct “big-box” stores in black Chicago, even as local labor market
researchers reported that the company’s proposed stores would actually generate
a net loss of jobs within the city’s black community” (see Paul Street, Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy
and the State of Black Chicago [Chicago Urban League, 2005]).
“The company’s proposed stores would
actually generate a net loss of jobs within the city’s black community.”
These
published comments were likely not read by Compton, as were numerous memorandums
I produced detailing Wal-Mart’s negative labor and related civil rights record
within and beyond the U.S.
Half a Basic Family Budget
is Just Too Much
I say that
the vetoed big-box bill was “modest” and “minimally decent” for some very
simple reasons. According to a rigorous
and reasonable study by the Economic Policy Institute, the cost of a “basic family budget” – the real no-frills
cost of living (taking into account housing, food, child care, transportation,
health care, and other necessities and taxes) – for even a small family of one
parent and two children in Chicago in 1999 was $35,307. The minimum wage that
would have been set by the dead ordinance would have required that Wal-Mart pay
its employees no less than $20,000 four years from now, when the minimum basic
family budget for a mom and two kids in the city will certainly cost more than
$40,000 a year, particularly when you factor in the ever rising disappearance
of affordable housing in Daley’s gentrifying metropolis. The measure that Daley is slaughtering, in
other words, wouldn’t have put Wal-Mart wages at more than half the escalating
cost of being a poor single mother with two children in the city. Black median household income in Chicago in
1999 was $6000 less than that basic small family budget. White median household income exceeded that
amount by more than $11,000.
Ironically
enough, “Mayor Big Business” and his sold-out “civil rights” supporters like
Compton (who has long parlayed his civic credentials into the attainment of
various corporate board memberships) seem to hold a remarkably low opinion of
American capitalism’s ability to meet basic human needs. If the American System’s dominant
managerial-capitalist mass-retailing firms were required to pay entry-level workers
just half the cost of a minimally decent small-family budget, they claim, those
great global enterprises would suddenly be unable to operate profitably in
Chicago. This would appear to be an argument for the construction of a
post-capitalist social order.
Daley’s Deleted Abandonment
The mayor’s
calculated racial rhetoric is rich with unintended irony. Who has been running
the metropolis during the years of ghetto abandonment that Daley claims to
oppose? A close friend and supporter of big white-run business, Daley’s
corporate-neoliberal reign of “pinstripe patronage” has more than accidentally
coincided with persistent and deepening black misery in and around the
city. The dominant city media’s mainly
laudatory appraisal of the Mayor over the years – recently tempered by a city
hiring and corruption scandals – has consistently ignored the steep racial oppression
and inequity experienced by hundreds of thousands of black Chicagoans living on
the outskirts and in the shadows of Daley’s ever more “beautified,” “vibrant,”
and expensive downtown business, commercial, and residential district and its
growing ring of glittering condominium and entertainment complexes. Endemic
deep poverty across the city’s vast stretch of highly segregated and
conspicuously non-beautified black neighborhoods has never struck the city’s
wealthy or this mayor as a “big ticket” item requiring concentrated private or
public investment.
“Endemic deep
poverty across the city’s vast stretch of highly segregated and conspicuously
non-beautified black neighborhoods has never struck the city’s wealthy or this
mayor as a ‘big ticket’ item.”
The $475
million that Daley got the city’s rich to spend on the city’s spectacular new
Millennium Park would have been more than welcome in those communities. It would be especially appreciated in the
form(s) of job training and/or child welfare and/or after school programs
and/or “green space” expansion and/or drug treatment and/or…fill in the blank.
The list of unmet neighborhood requirements goes on and on. It includes a
crying need for affordable housing in the face of the mayor’s dedication to the
gentrification of centrally located neighborhoods that are marked out as the
preserve of affluent urban professionals deemed vital for the city’s ascendancy
to the status of a “global metropolis.”
Local
corporate media in global Chicago routinely ignores the curious fact that
social and economic inequality deepened between Chicago’s black and white
neighborhoods during the decade between Daley II’s ascendancy in 1999. That rising inequality has been richly fed
by the mayor’s corporate, downtown-centered, and globalist development regime,
which has pushed many of the city’s numerous black poor further and further to
the urban and suburban margins of the new global metropolis.
Chicagoans who paid attention got a taste of the depth and
degree of Daley’s disdain for the city’s many black poor when he joined his
“good friend” the openly plutocratic President George W. Bush on an imperial
helicopter flight that passed over some of the city’s ghetto communities on the
way to address the rich, corporate, and extremely white “Chicago Economic Club”
at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers in January of 2003.
The purpose
of Bush’s visit was to sell his call for the elimination of taxes on American
corporate dividends – a measure that was designed, the New York Times observed, to “cost the government $300 billion over
ten years” and “create much bigger budget deficits for the future.” “More than half the benefit of eliminating
dividend taxes,” the Times reported,
“would flow to the wealthiest 5 percent of taxpayers.” Bush also called for the acceleration of
preexisting steep income tax cuts and the repeal of the estate tax, which
meaningfully affects only a tiny and super-privileged and very
disproportionately white segment of the population.
While Bush
accused those who opposed his profoundly regressive tax “stimulus” plan of
engaging in “class warfare,” his package was designed to increase the already
formidable accumulation of private wealth in disproportionately white places
like Chicago’s Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, and Lake Forest while further
bankrupting already inadequate social programs serving devastated black Chicago
neighborhoods where corporate stock ownership and high incomes were too rare
for residents to applaud the president’s jihad against the “double taxation” of
corporate dividends and his call for top-down tax relief.
After
flying over part of North Lawndale in an impressive, roaring phalanx of armored
military helicopters with the president on the way from O’Hare to the Gold
Coast Sheraton and listening to the president’s largely inept tax-cut pitch,
the Mayor told reporters that Bush “hit a home run in that he talked to Middle
America. I don’t think it was good
versus evil,” Daley said, or “‘rich versus poor.’” Daley’s concept of “Middle
America” left out much of his own city, including fifteen predominantly
nonwhite community areas, very disproportionately black, where more than a
quarter of the children were living at less than half the poverty level in
1999.
Corporate Deletions,
Corporate Blackmail
In Tribune and Sun Times editorials applauding the mayor’s gallant action to “save
jobs” and “economic development” for Chicago, there was no mention of recent
estimation by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic
Development’s determination that Wal-Mart will displace more merchandising jobs
than it creates in the city. There was
no mention of the money that will be sucked out of the metropolis by large
corporate chains that do not invest or save primarily in Chicago. There was no
mention, of course, of Wal-Mart’s long
record of violating civil rights and equal opportunity employment laws or of
the large number of Wal-Mart workers who are compelled by its low wages and
benefits to rely on public assistance.
“Wal-Mart
will displace more merchandising jobs than it creates in the city.”
There was
nothing about the terrible impact of its global purchasing practices on U.S.
manufacturing employment or about the millions of public dollars that Wal-Mart
and other large retailers extort from the city in the form of local and state
subsidies and tax breaks. There was nothing about the company’s record of
refusing to hire ex-offenders, a major concern in a city where – as I showed in
a 2002 Chicago Urban League report that held minimal interest for Compton (who
was more interested at the time in supporting Daley’s push for the expansion of
O’Hare Airport’s runway capacity) – at least 40 percent of black male adults carry the crippling mark of
a criminal record.
There was
nothing about the remarkably humble and affordable level of the wage and
benefit levels the big box ordinance would have mandated for large retailers’
lowest-paid employees. Like the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and the craven
business-dominated Chicago Urban League, the papers’ editors simply repeated as
self-evident truth the big retailers’ insistence that they simply couldn’t
afford to pay entry-level workers wages equal to half the cost of a tiny
family’s basic budget and ignored the NYU Brennan Center for Justice’s informed
judgment that big retailers’ assets and their pressing need to enter new urban
markets would have compelled them to work within the minimally decent wage
standards set by the law.
Welcome to
the world of metropolitan neoliberal racism, where the regressive workings of
the supposed “free market” – well, the machinations of the market and state’s
creature and master The Corporation – are falsely sold as the solution of
capitalism’s most truly disadvantaged inner city victims and where filthy-rich,
limousine-riding “civil rights” leaders play ball with the objectively racist
Mayor in handing the keys to the city to ruthless and concentrated economic
power.
An Afterword
In a
depressing aftermath to this essay's original draft, a front-page
article in the New York Times that
appeared three weeks after Daley’s veto reports that Wal-Mart is “pushing to
create cheaper, more flexible workforce by capping wages, using more part-time
workers and scheduling more workers on nights and weekends.” Wal-Mart workers
report that managers are “further reducing their already modest incomes and
putting a serious strain on their child-rearing and personal lives” by
demanding that workers “make themselves available around the clock.” By numerous worker accounts, Wal-Mart is
“making changes with an eye to forcing out longtime higher-wage workers to make
way for lower-wage part-time employees” who put less strain on the firm’s wage
and benefit costs. Investment analysts
and store managers report that Wal-Mart executive wants to push the percentage
of Wal-Mart employees who work part-time from the current rate of 25 percent to
40 percent (Mike Barbaro and Stephen Greenhouse, New York Times, 2 October 2006, p. A1).
“Wal-Mart is
‘making changes with an eye to forcing out longtime higher-wage workers to make
way for lower-wage part-time employees’ who put less strain on the firm’s wage
and benefit costs.”
The drive
to eliminate older, long-term workers is consistent with a notorious internal
Wal-Mart memo that was anonymously released to reporters in October of
2005. In that
revealing communication, leading Wal-Mart human resources officer Susan
Chambers argued that it was not cost-efficient for the company to employ
long-term workers. She maintained that
shifting to more part-time employees would help the company reduce the number
of workers eligible for expensive health-care benefits (Stephen Greenhouse and
Mike Barbaro, New York Times, 26
October, 2005, p. A1). Chalmers has subsequently been promoted to Executive
Vice President for Human Resources at Wal-Mart.
Reflecting
the cost-cutting Chalmers agenda, the Times
reports, Wal-Mart is currently pushing senior workers out of their jobs by
insisting that they agree to be available for work 24 hours a day and seven
days a week and by denying older employees with back or leg problems the right
to use stools on the job. A 67-year-old
woman with a service record of 22 years and an $11 hourly wage at an Oklahoma
Wal-Mart told the Times that her
supervisors recently insisted that she be ready to report 24/7 – without
any time restrictions. Wal-Mart was trying “to get rid of
me," this long-service senior citizen reports, "to save on health
insurance and wages” (Barbaro and Greenhouse, 2006).
Now that the
Urban League’s Compton has finally made his long retirement from meaningful
civil rights activism official, he could go to
work at Wal-Mart. This might
help him develop a focused perspective on the extent to which it is
possible to develop “balanced communities” and stable families on the basis of
Wal-Mart wages and Wal-Mart work schedules.
While
Compton performs this participant-observatory research, other investigators
can pursue a different line of inquiry.
They should try to determine how much money Wal-Mart and/or any of
its mass-retailer partners have contributed to the Chicago Urban League, paying
special attention to these companies’ participation in the agency’s upcoming
Golden Fellowship Dinner. They can also look for any evidence that Wal-Mart is
rewarding Compton or other CUL staff or board members personally, consistent
with a long tradition of racialized business class bribery and civil rights
sell-out within and beyond “global Chicago.”
Paul Street was the Director of Research at the Chicago Urban
League between 2000 and 2005. He is the
author of Empire and Inequality: America
and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO:
Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the
Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY:
Routledge, 2005), and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in
Chicago (Chicago, 2005) Street’s next
book is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago
History (New York, 2007).