Mall-wart
Chicago, like many communities around the country, has been faced with the dilemma of allowing Wal-Mart to set up shop within its city limits.
On the one hand, the proposed store on the city's West Side will likely create jobs in a predominantly black and economically depressed area of the city. On the other hand, most of those jobs will be low-paying sales clerk positions without benefits, and the mega-retailer's cutthroat business practices will threaten small businesses in the area.
Ordinarily I'd say I'm against letting in Wal-Mart, prima facie, simply because I think its business and labor practices are immoral and indefensible, even if they do yield rock bottom prices for consumers.
Yet I've recently had an idea for a creative way to resolve this dispute: approve Wal-Mart's request for a building permit, but make its business license contingent on opening up the store to unionization. Make it a closed shop even. But if such an idea passed muster on the city council, it could really mark a breakthrough for the labor movement vis-à-vis Wal-Mart. The corporation needs to learn to play by the rules and to not be militantly anti-union (as in instructing store managers to report any employee's mention of "union" or situations when employees simply converse with each other in groups). If one Wal-Mart becomes unionized, that will only intensify the pressure on the chain to allow other stores to do likewise.
Of course, it's also entirely possible (even probable) that attaching such conditions will cause Wal-Mart to abandon the project altogether. But if that's the case, isn't it then obvious that our concerns about its labor practices are justified, and that we are wise to want to keep it from our neighborhoods?
On the one hand, the proposed store on the city's West Side will likely create jobs in a predominantly black and economically depressed area of the city. On the other hand, most of those jobs will be low-paying sales clerk positions without benefits, and the mega-retailer's cutthroat business practices will threaten small businesses in the area.
Ordinarily I'd say I'm against letting in Wal-Mart, prima facie, simply because I think its business and labor practices are immoral and indefensible, even if they do yield rock bottom prices for consumers.
Yet I've recently had an idea for a creative way to resolve this dispute: approve Wal-Mart's request for a building permit, but make its business license contingent on opening up the store to unionization. Make it a closed shop even. But if such an idea passed muster on the city council, it could really mark a breakthrough for the labor movement vis-à-vis Wal-Mart. The corporation needs to learn to play by the rules and to not be militantly anti-union (as in instructing store managers to report any employee's mention of "union" or situations when employees simply converse with each other in groups). If one Wal-Mart becomes unionized, that will only intensify the pressure on the chain to allow other stores to do likewise.
Of course, it's also entirely possible (even probable) that attaching such conditions will cause Wal-Mart to abandon the project altogether. But if that's the case, isn't it then obvious that our concerns about its labor practices are justified, and that we are wise to want to keep it from our neighborhoods?
posted by Alexander Dubcek | 20:10
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