Back when Wal-Mart first proposed opening stores in Chicago in 2004, the nation’s unemployment rate was 5.6 percent and the City Council thought it could afford the luxury of turning the company away. Big labor was at war with Wal-Mart because the company doesn’t have union workers. So Chicago politicians said Wal-Mart jobs weren’t good enough for Chicagoans. One store was allowed to open, but the company’s bid for more was spurned.
Now unemployment is at 7.6 percent, the economy is in desperate shape, companies are shedding workers. Nearly 600,000 Americans lost their jobs last month.
And here comes word that Wal-Mart still wants to put Chicagoans to work. The company is renewing its Chicago push. John Bisio, Wal-Mart’s Illinois director of public affairs and governmental relations, told us Friday that it is looking at “roughly a dozen potential locations” in the city.
Do the aldermen still think Wal-Mart jobs aren’t good enough for Chicagoans? We’ll soon see.
We know where one store ought to go — on that vacant South Side lot in Chatham where Wal-Mart proposed building a 195,000-square-foot supercenter two years ago. That would have brought a Wal-Mart with a full grocery store to an area that really needs such services. The city stalled that proposal.
That 50 acres at 83rd Street and Stewart Avenue is still a big empty lot. Bisio confirms that that’s one of the dozen potential sites being considered, which ought to bring cheers from South Siders.
The lone Wal-Mart that managed to win city approval opened two and a half years ago near North and Cicero Avenues. It provides about 430 jobs and pays its hourly workers an average $11.25, Bisio said. As of September, it had collected and paid $10.4 million in sales taxes; half of that went to the city, Cook County and the RTA. Since the Wal-Mart opened, the neighborhood around it has gained a Menards, an Aldi, three new banks, a CVS pharmacy, a movie theater and about a dozen other retail stores.
If the aldermen don’t welcome Wal-Mart jobs now, they ought to be sent to the unemployment line.
