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Monday, July 31, 2006
They hate you, Wal-Mart
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wal-Mart, they hate you. Go away. Get out of town. Die. Shocking but true. The left’s war on Wal-Mart is unrelenting. It’s the favorite whipping boy of unionists and their minions who despise the company because it declines to roll over for union organizers. And liberals despise it, in particular, because it builds “big-box” stores that they identify with, ugh, suburbia and SUVs and cul-de-sacs and “sprawl” and all the social ills — white flight, gas-guzzling commutes and cleared land — that freeways wrought. Joining them in sympathetic chorus is the business class of small-town America, a group that sees the retail giant as the hearse coming to bury them.
While Americans love success in football, baseball and other sports, many hate or begrudge it in business, especially in successful corporations and tough competitors that decline to be coerced, shaken down or otherwise rolled. Target: Wal-Mart.
First, Democratic legislators in Maryland passed a law, struck down by a federal judge in July, forcing Wal-Mart to pay 8 percent of payroll in medical benefits — or else pay a one-company tax to the state. Then last Wednesday, Chicago passed a city ordinance requiring retailers with more than $1 billion in sales and stores of at least 90,000 square feet to pay employees a “living wage” of $10 an hour by mid-2010. The company says it pays an average of almost $11 per hour at its Chicago area stores, and the least it will pay at the first in-town store to open there in September will be $7.25 per hour. Company officials are deciding how to respond.
American cities, the big ones anyway, often seem less about filling potholes than about pursuing agendas. San Francisco, Washington, Sante Fe and Albuquerque have also implemented “living wage” ordinances. (Of course, in Congress Democrats who see the minimum wage as the issue that will help them reclaim the House in November are in a quandry because the GOP brought forth and the House passed on Saturday legislation to raise the minimum wage to $7.25 over three years. The bill also reduces the death tax, which is now set to expire in 2010, before jumping back to 55 percent in 2011 unless Congress acts.)
At some point soon, courts, Congress and State Legislatures need to step in, as a federal district judge did in striking down the Maryland law, to stop local goverments from imposing social agendas on private companies. If city officials believe workers are entitled to a “living wage” of a sum it specifies, either it should pay the compensation from tax revenues, or grant the company tax credits sufficient to cover added costs. However it’s done, cities, counties and states should pay companies for the cost of complying with mandates that create local exceptions.
When govenrment acts without justification to single out law-abiding businesses with punitive laws, ordinances and regulations, all of us should take pause. A government that can turn on Wal-Mart can turn on us, too.
