Race to the Bottom (Page 3)

But the organizing Wal-Mart representatives did, and the arguments they made, may have been just as important as any cash they doled out. They talked to ministers and community groups about the jobs the company was going to bring, and the low prices. "It was just smart," says Renaye Manley, the national field representative in the AFL-CIO's Midwest office, which is based in Chicago. "And it made our job that much harder." Manley, who is black and from Chicago's South Side, thinks Wal-Mart's outreach was more important than its money and that most community leaders were not bought off but genuinely convinced: "People just wanted to see jobs. These folks have a vision for their communities." James Thindwa, a Zimbabwean who heads Chicago's Jobs With Justice, says, "A lot of good, decent people bought the argument that any job is better than none." Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, writing for The Black Commentator, had a harsher take on this "slavish" acceptance of anything corporate America has on offer, chastising Chicago's black politicians for failing "to address Black community development as an issue of democracy."

Most destructively, Thindwa says--and other Chicago activists agree--"Wal-Mart played the race card." The company told the city's black leaders that the unions fighting the retailer were racist, effectively exploiting existing racial tensions in the city. As elsewhere, the building trades unions in Chicago have historically discriminated against blacks. But it is service unions like the Service Employees International that are speaking out the most against Wal-Mart, and in cities, their membership is mostly people of color. "[Wal-Mart] knew what buttons to push," Redmond acknowledges, but he's outraged that so many black leaders bought the simplistic line that all unions are racist. "I've never seen so much ignorance. They had no sense at all of the history of African-Americans in unions. A. Philip Randolph, ever heard of him? So they're going to side with the corporate enslaver, like, 'Wal-Mart will save us Negroes!'"

Thindwa says, "Wal-Mart was able to paint this as white unions protecting their turf, instead of as a broad-based community issue." Worse, activists now agree, the anti-Wal-Mart coalition failed to respond effectively to the company's race-baiting. Dorian Warren, an African-American community activist and member of the Chicago Workers' Rights Board, says, "The media framed it as 'white labor versus the black community.' We were not able to change the frame."

There are clearly profound racial tensions in the labor movement, and as Wal-Mart continues to move into cities it is likely to continue to exploit these tensions. Warren, a public policy scholar at the University of Chicago, says, "I've been at a loss to figure out why the labor movement can't have an honest conversation about race." Contributing to the problem, black-led labor activism has declined in recent decades, and many mainstream unions aren't training black leaders (which is closely related to their failure to develop leaders from the rank and file of any race). There's a sense--in these battles over Wal-Mart, as in many other situations--that labor uses communities of color when it's convenient but drops them when a particular campaign is over. That's easily exploited since, as Warren puts it, "there's just enough truth to it."

Of course, there's still plenty of skepticism among African-Americans about Wal-Mart.

Indeed, some black clergy were leaders in the fight against Wal-Mart in Chicago. Community opposition probably did contribute to the retailer's defeat on the South Side and may help the coalition's attempts to pass an ordinance requiring Wal-Mart to pay a living wage to workers on the West Side. In Inglewood, the fight against Wal-Mart was led by black and Latino church and community activists, and very few leaders were bought off. Blacks there did not buy the line that Wal-Mart was antiracist and the unions--therefore, all of Wal-Mart's opponents--were racist. That's partly because in Inglewood relations between the United Food and Commercial Workers and the community groups were much better. Whereas in Chicago the union often insisted on having its white and male leadership speak at public events, in Inglewood black women who lived in the town and worked in supermarkets were prominent faces in Wal-Mart's public opposition; they knocked on doors and talked to their fellow citizens about why their unionized grocery job was so important to them and their families, and why Wal-Mart was such a threat.

Madeline Janis-Aparicio of the Coalition for a Better Inglewood says about her campaign's success: "We were also lucky--Wal-Mart did something really stupid." In trying to pass an ordinance exempting itself from the town's laws, the company violated the largely black community's most basic requirement: respect. "We used that," says Janis-Aparicio, who credits that theme with winning over the church leadership and many Inglewood voters. After one large, mainstream black church joined the anti-Wal-Mart fight, the rest followed, not just lending passive endorsement but enthusiastically rallying their forces. Another helpful issue was crime--Wal-Mart is the nation's leading purveyor of guns. To rural white communities, that's often a political asset, but to urban black voters it's a harsh liability. In the last few days of the Inglewood campaign, the anti-Wal-Mart coalition hung a flier in the shape of an M-16 rifle on everybody's door. "Some on our side felt it was a scare tactic," Janis-Aparicio admits, but, she adds with justified pride, "it had a powerful impact."

Even in Chicago, Wal-Mart's own actions may end up helping its opponents. Elce Redmond says, "A lot of people who supported Wal-Mart at first are now saying, 'Elce, you were right.' Wal-Mart made a lot of promises, and hasn't delivered." Politicians and community leaders are now finding that since Wal-Mart secured permission to open the West Side store, its officials aren't returning their calls too readily. Rather than agreeing to pay workers decently, the company sent 300 holiday turkeys for the community's needy. That struck many people as a shallow response to concerns about the store's economic impact. "People are beginning to ask questions," says Redmond. "Why can't Wal-Mart pay a living wage? Why can't its workers have a union if they want one? Why not?"

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