Chicago Mayor Daley: 'Screw working people!'

On Monday, Chicago mayor Richard Daley used the first veto in his 17 years in office to defeat a living wage ordinance that would have required big-box retailers like Walmart and Target (with 90,000 square feet or more) to pay a living wage of $10 bucks an hour plus $3 dollars in benefits to their Chicago employees. The ordinance, passed in July by a 35-14 vote, was to be phased in by 2010, and the wage floor would have been indexed to inflation thereafter.

Similar "big box" ordinances have passed in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, San Francisco and DC.

In his veto statement, Daley said: "I understand and share a desire to ensure that everyone who works in the City of Chicago earns a decent wage. But … I believe [the ordinance] would drive jobs and businesses from our city, penalizing neighborhoods that need additional economic activity the most."

What a weasel, and what a tragedy that the mayor of Chicago, the City of Broad Shoulders, a city that once honored the work ethic of its blue-collar residents, would go against a bill that required employers to pay a fair wage for a fair day's work.On Wednesday, in classic Chicago style, the council fell three votes short of the 34 needed to override Daley's veto. The vote was scheduled for two days after the veto, so one of the Aldermen who had voted for the measure originally and would presumably have voted to kill the veto couldn't return from a trip to China in time. Shirley Coleman from the 16th ward flipped when Walmart promised (but not in writing) to build a store in her district. According to the Sun Times, Danny Solis, of the 25th ward, denied that he had reversed his vote "in return for an appointment to the job of city clerk he has reportedly coveted," meaning, of course, that he flipped in return for the city clerk job that he had coveted (this is, after all, Chicago, where a Mayor named Daley has been in office for 37 of the last 51 years and they've played the City council like maestros).

As usual, Walmart and Target had threatened to abandon the city if the law passed. But the fact is that there are three million consumers in Chicago, and the big box retailers have already saturated the rural markets. They have nowhere else to go but into American cities. Daley should have answered that if their business model doesn't allow them to pay fair wages and still make a buck, then it's a bad model. Costco pays its workers $10/ hour to start (and also covers 92 percent of its employees' healthcare costs, compared with two-thirds at Walmart). A poll commissioned by Walmart Watch at the end of August found that seven out of ten Chicagoans supported the measure.

And big retailers' threats to go elsewhere are always a bluff. "In fights like this, retailers use the exit threat, then stay and expand," Annette Bernhardt, a labor expert at New York University Law School, told Time Magazine. David Coss, mayor of Santa Fe, said: "We were also told the sky was going to fall, but all we've seen is strong growth." Time notes that in Santa Fe, "with the city's $9.50 wage floor set to rise to $10.50 in 2008, Target and Sam's Club are thriving. Wal-Mart is even building a superstore."

But despite that experience, the threat of killing new job growth -- playing one city or state against the others -- seems to work more often than not. Which is why it's somewhat surprising that we haven't seen the launch of a powerful nationwide living wage campaign. That would put an end to these games once and for all (and retail and other face-to-face service jobs can't be off-shored). Living wages and increases in the minimum wage are immensely popular; an AFL-CIO sponsored poll found that 84 percent of Americans --including a sizeable majority of conservatives -- agreed that "as a country, we should make sure that people who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty." A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times reported that "wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960's."