By Jane Birnbaum

A California Community Coalition Took on Wal-Mart—and Won

When Wal-Mart sought to build a supercenter the size of 17 football fields in Inglewood, Calif., a working-class city near Los Angeles, the world’s largest retail corporation got a big surprise: More than 61 percent of the mostly African American and Latino voters rejected Wal-Mart’s complicated, 71-page ballot measure that would have OKed the project and exempted it from local and state planning reviews.

Through the efforts of the Coalition for a Better Inglewood, a diverse group of community- and faith-based groups, elected officials, union activists and small business owners, Inglewood voters defeated Wal-Mart’s first attempt to win voters’ approval on a specific store. They recognized Wal-Mart’s measure for what it was—an end run around a likely ban on the supercenter by city council members, who included a recently elected United Food and Commercial Workers business agent.

Wal-Mart likely will replicate its efforts elsewhere, proposing complex ballot measures as it tries to roll out new supercenters. But Wal-Mart’s efforts to bulldoze ­communities into supporting creation of its low-wage, low-benefit jobs that drive out good middle-class jobs and small businesses can garner the type of coordinated opposition that paved the way to victory in Inglewood.

“If Wal-Mart wants to take it to the people, then we must, too,” says Los Angeles County Federation of Labor Executive Secretary-Treasurer Miguel Contreras.

The Inglewood activists recognized the critical importance of stopping Wal-Mart from killing good jobs in the community. According to UFCW research, in the top 100 cities where Wal-Mart’s share of the retail grocery industry grew more than 20 percent between 1998 and 2002, the number of cashier jobs fell as much as 2.3 percent.

Jobs that remained pay 5.5 cents less hourly for every 1 percent of the industry Wal-Mart gained. America has shifted sharply from well-paying to low-paying jobs since the economic “recovery” began in November 2001, according to a Economic Policy Institute January 2004 study that found the downward wage trend hitting all but two of 50 states. And Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest employer with a workforce of 1.3 million, is a driving force setting new lows for wages.

In Inglewood, the first step in the fight to keep good jobs was building a coalition including the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice and the Industrial Areas Foundation as well as unions such as the UFCW and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees. The broadness of the coalition “really enforced our message,” says Contreras. “We thought we had a good shot, but nobody predicted a 61–39 defeat for Wal-Mart, especially since it outspent us 10–1. It shows you the power of community.”

Wal-Mart didn’t spare its firepower. At neighborhood meetings, its operatives rhapsodized about low prices and new jobs and handed out grocery certificates. The Wal-Mart representatives threw parties with live music and food. They sent 30 mailers, including one featuring an 82-year-old retired nurse—who says she did not make the favorable remarks the mailer attributed to her, according to the LA Weekly newspaper.

The HomeStretch at Hollywood Park offers new jobs Your Yes vote on Measure 04-A will pave the way for new jobs in Inglewood. The HomeStretch will create 2,500 construction jobs. Once the new shopping center is complete, there will be over 1,000 new good paying jobs Many of these will be entry-level jobs with lots of career opportunities that will give the young people of Inglewood a jump-start to help them on their way. "Inglewood needs more shopping choices closer to home. We need more jobs for your young people. And the city could use more money for senior programs." —Annie Lee Martin, retired nurse, Inglewood Wal-Mart sent a mailer to Inglewood residents that featured 82-year-old Annie Lee Martin—who says she did not make the favorable remarks attributed to her.

The coalition’s first task was informing voters in congregations and at town hall and block meetings about the content of Wal-Mart’s proposal. “We needed to make sure that citizens, whether for or against Wal-Mart, knew what they were voting on,” says Inglewood city council member Eloy Morales Jr. “They were being asked to give up local control and public oversight. And the ­measure was written so they could approve it with a simple majority but later would need a two-thirds majority if they wanted to reverse it.”

After laying this groundwork with voters, the coalition took on Wal-Mart directly. In January, community activists and grocery workers, who were striking and locked out from Vons and other grocers, marched to Wal-Mart’s proposed site in Inglewood.

“We made sure coalition members were prominent, and we drew the connection between Wal-Mart driving down wages and what was happening to the grocery workers,” says Los Angeles County Federation of Labor political director Charles Lester. Also that month, when Wal-Mart sought to underwrite the annual Martin Luther King Jr. march in Los Angeles, the federation instead garnered the sponsorship by collecting $40,000 from 30 local unions.

In March and April, during the campaign’s final three weeks, union members hit the streets to reach all Inglewood voters, union and nonunion. Volunteers sent eight pieces of mail, made more than 15,000 phone calls on a 50-line dialing system and turned out 400 union activists, mostly Inglewood residents, to knock on doors in all city precincts. With momentum building in the final days, union-sponsored rallies included appearances by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, U.S. Reps. Maxine Waters and Diane Watson (D-Calif.) and Inglewood’s state assembly member, Democrat Jerome Horton.

But coalition leaders note their efforts were just the beginning. “Wal-Mart is still a big threat,” Contreras says. “The rabidly anti-union chain plans 40 supercenters in California. Wal-Mart wants to soon control 20 percent of the state’s retail food market.”

Communities no longer buy Wal-Mart’s broken promises

Just a few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine such a diverse coalition opposing Wal-Mart. Many of the nation’s civic leaders, unaware of Wal-Mart’s harm to communities, lavished public money on the corporate giant.

In the early 1990s, Wal-Mart demanded and got sales tax abatements worth up to $1.8 million in the Southern California working-class town of Cathedral City in exchange for building two stores, including a Sam’s Club discount store, according to Mayor Pro Tem Greg Pettis, who at the time was a city activist avidly supporting the deal.

But last year, just as the city began reaping much-needed sales tax benefits from Wal-Mart, city leaders—faced with a $3 million deficit—learned Wal-Mart was closing the two stores and opening a new supercenter, selling groceries as well as general merchandise, nearby. Shoppers heading to the supercenter would increase traffic in Cathedral City as they drove through.

	Mobilized: Inglewood residents succeeded in keeping out Wal-Mart with the help of local clergy and community groups.

Just as it did in Inglewood, Wal-Mart dangled the prospect of low prices and new jobs for Cathedral City residents. Pettis says of the 220 jobs Wal-Mart promised, about 180 materialized—and most were part time.

Today, Pettis warns other community leaders and activists not to let in Wal-Mart, much less finance it with taxpayer dollars. “It’s the biggest mistake they can make with public money,” he warns. “Wal-Mart’s jobs are low paying, and workers don’t have health care.”

Investigators with the nonprofit research group Good Jobs First find that taxpayers, through public financial incentives, have frequently subsidized the growth of Wal-Mart. Looking at records beginning in the early 1980s, researchers found that taxpayers helped finance 84 Wal-Mart distribution centers—more than 90 percent of the company’s national warehouse network—at an average subsidy of $7.4 million. An additional 160 Wal-Mart retail stores received an average $2.8 million in subsidies, with the largest scoring a whopping $12.3 million in subsidies for a supercenter set to open next year in Country Club Hills, Ill.

Last year, the corporation made nearly $9 billion in profit and paid its CEO H. Lee Scott more than $12 million in total compensation, according to company statements filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Significant limitations should be placed on the use of subsidies for big-box retailing,” Good Jobs First concludes, citing harm to communities such as urban sprawl and the destruction of good jobs.

Wal-Mart’s virulent anti-union policies keep wages low

According to a 2002 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, unionized workers in the retail food industry make more than 30 percent more in hourly wages than their nonunion counterparts.

But when new employees start working at Wal-Mart, one of the first things they are required to do is watch a video warning them against joining a union, according to author Barbara Ehrenreich, who chronicled her experience working at Wal-Mart in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

When seven Jacksonville, Texas, meat cutters became the first Wal-Mart workers to join a union, voting for UFCW in 2000, they were demoted to sales associates after Wal-Mart changed their job descriptions. In June 2003, a National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge found Wal-Mart violated federal labor laws by refusing to bargain over job changes.

While fighting its workers’ efforts to join a union and bargain for family-supportive wages and benefits, Wal-Mart balks at paying even the poverty-level wages workers have earned. As of December 2002, 31 wage and hour lawsuits in 30 states had been filed against Wal-Mart, claiming tens of millions in back pay for hundreds of thousands of workers forced to work off the clock or denied breaks. In April 2004, the California Supreme Court declined to block class certification in a lawsuit alleging Wal-Mart Stores Inc. required some 250,000 employees to work off the clock.

And when Wal-Mart interferes with its workers’ freedom to form unions to keep wages and benefits down, it encourages other employers to follow suit. According to a report prepared for the city of Los Angeles, grocery chains cited “the labor policies of nonunion superstore retailers” as a factor in their demanding wage and benefit cuts from UFCW grocery workers who struck and were locked out in 2003.

Wal-Mart’s everyday low wages mean taxpayers pick up the bill

	How Much of Your Tax Bill Goes to Wal-Mart? Think that low-cost TV at Wal-Mart is a good deal? Better look again. Every taxpayer pays the price for Wal-Mart’s cheap goods. Find out more about the hidden costs of shopping at Wal-Mart at www.aflcio.org.

Wal-Mart’s retail workers earned an average $8.23 hourly in 2001, when the company considered 29 hours “full time,” according to Business Week. That means a typical “full-time” Wal-Mart worker made just $12,311 in 2001—well below the $13,630 federal poverty guideline for a family of three that year.

Hobbled by low pay, barriers to eligibility and high costs, fewer than 50 percent of Wal-Mart workers receive health coverage on the job—compared with 66 percent of workers at average large U.S. firms, according to an October 2003 AFL-CIO report.

Instead of paying its workers family-supportive wages and benefits, Wal-Mart passes the buck to communities and taxpayers: Every Wal-Mart store employing 200 people costs taxpayers approximately $420,750 annually in public social services for its employees, including $42,000 in Section 8 federal housing assistance, $125,000 for low-income federal tax credits and deductions and $9,750 in energy assistance subsidies. Those figures are from a recent report, Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart, from the staff of Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee. (The committee staff calculated these numbers by multiplying publicly known program costs by an estimated number of Wal-Mart employees that would become eligible for these programs.)

In California alone, taxpayers in 2002 paid $20.5 million to provide public health care for Wal-Mart workers, according to researchers at the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California–Berkeley.

In fact, Wal-Mart managers are encouraged to guide workers to public assistance, according to Stan Fortune, who worked for Wal-Mart in six states over 17 years. “In management training classes, the company would never admit that we weren’t paying enough for people to buy insurance or it was too expensive,” he recalls.

“But it was suggested that if we were going to do right by workers, we would find out where in our communities we could get help for them. Eventually, a regional district manager told me flat out that Wal-Mart couldn’t afford to supply insurance and we should just let the state do it.”

When Wal-Mart moves in, good jobs move out

	All together: Rev. Altagracia Perez of Holy Faith Episcopal Church rallies community activists against Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart not only creates jobs that don’t support working families, its low prices often help kill local businesses that provide good middle-class jobs—the backbones of stable communities. In Cathedral City, many essential small businesses, including hardware and stationery stores, were forced to close their doors after Wal-Mart moved in, taking approximately 60 good jobs with them, according to Pettis.

Operating deep in the red, Cathedral City is unable to fill seven police and three paramedic positions. To save money, the city stopped watering its parks, which now have turned brown with dead foliage. Despite the city’ s financial woes, Pettis says even if Wal-Mart offered to stay and the city benefited from its sales taxes, he wouldn’t want it: “Wal-Mart is not a good neighbor.”

A good corporate neighbor negotiates with elected officials—it doesn’t try to bypass them and fool voters with 71-page initiatives, parties and free food. “I think Wal-Mart disrespected the people of Inglewood,” he says. “It thought they wouldn’t inform themselves about the issues. Our elected leaders do respect the citizens. @

Get the Facts on Wal-Mart Check out these reports, articles and websites to get the facts on how Wal-Mart destroys good jobs, passes the buck to taxpayers, violates workers’ rights and creates urban sprawl. Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart, a report by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce: http://edworkforce.house.gov /democrats/WALMARTREPORT.pdf Wal-Mart: An Example of Why Workers Remain Uninsured and Underinsured, an AFL-CIO report: http://www.aflcio.org/issuespolitics/healthpolicy/upload/Wal-Mart_final.pdf Shopping for Subsidies: How Wal-Mart Uses Taxpayer Money to Finance Its Never-Ending Growth: http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/pdf/wmtstudy.pdf The United Food and Commercial Workers: www.walmartwatch.org Background on the Jackson, Texas, Wal-Mart meat cutters: http://www.union4walmart.com/states/texas.htm A 2003 City of Los Angeles report on supercenters: http://www.lacity.org/council/cd13/c13pfdc1c.htm A 1999 report on the impact of big-box grocers in Southern California, prepared by the Orange County (Calif.) Business Council: http://bcn.boulder.co.us/community/lrrd/lrrdbig_box_study.pdf Protect Your Job & Community From Big Box Sprawl, a 2003 report from the Wisconsin Sierra Club: http://wisconsin.sierraclub.org/pdf/Big%20Box%20Report%20WI-2003.pdf The Jobs Are Back in Town: Urban Smart Growth and Construction Employment, a Good Jobs First research group study: http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/pdf/backintown.pdf A website devoted to a class action gender ­discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart: http://www.walmartclass.com/walmartclass94.pl Statistical Analysis of Gender Patterns in Wal-Mart Workforce, a report from the University of California–Berkeley: http://www.walmartclass.com/walmartclass94.pl?wsi=0& websys_screen=all_reports_view&websys_id=18 “The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know,” by Charles Fishman, from the December 2003 issue of Fast Company magazine: http://www.fastcompany.com /magazine/77/walmart.html “Wal-Mart’s Impact Far Reaching,” by Jeffrey Rubin, from the March 8, 2004, edition of the Toronto Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040308 /RRUBIN08/TPBusiness/Columnist