It was all right for the North and Southwest sides [of Chicago] to get big boxes before this. No one said anything. All the sudden, when we talk about economic development in the black community, there's something wrong.It may be pure political leverage for the mayor to accuse big-box ordinance supporters of racism, but the double-standard at work here is not something Daley invented out of whole cloth. Comfortable North Side neighborhoods have had big box stores for ages--Targets, Home Depots, Bed Bath & Beyonds. Think the employees of these North Side stores can afford to live in the high-rent areas surrounding them? Me neither. And yet something tells me political opposition to the ordinance would have been considerably higher if Target were threatening to pull out of its Elston Street location than when the site was down on 119th Street. It's worth noting again that the neighborhoods who most strenuously opposed the ordinance were the ones it would have affected directly.
To be sure, the big-box ordinance was not the direct result of racism. Besides being about the wages themselves, it was an attempt by the city council to test the mayor's political strength (still pretty strong) and by labor unions to specifically target Wal-Mart's urban strategy (which is also still pretty strong, it would seem). That the bill would have blocked job-production in blighted black neighborhoods was just not a high enough cost to dissuade them.
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The event that precipitated the fight was Walmart coming to Chicago, not big boxes in Black neighborhoods.
The next most important factor is the growing assertiveness of organized labor, especially SEIU.
BTW, SEIU probably has a higher percentage of Black members than any big union in the country.
Okay, but where is Wal-Mart planning to build? In black neighborhoods...
I mean look, there's no way this is simply about race, and Daley is guilty of oversimplifying and grandstanding to make it sound that way. But it also seems to me that in this case the assertiveness of organized labor--and certainly that of North Side aldermen like Joe Moore--was that much easier to come by when black neighborhoods were the ones affected.
I finally added some new posts to the site, including one on this topic (no promise that it'll be anything you didn't already know).
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