Wal-Mart's Urban Romance

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Chicago is a union town. But in Mitts' ward--and among many poor blacks--some unions rank only a couple of notches above the Ku Klux Klan. Black leaders in Chicago have repeatedly charged that the building-trades unions, traditionally controlled by whites, are keeping a grip on jobs. While 37% of Chicago is black, only 10% of all new apprentices in the construction trades between 2000 and 2003 were black, according to the Chicago Tribune. The unions that most vociferously oppose Wal-Mart are not in the building trades but represent retail workers, such as the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which has long welcomed blacks. Still, Mitts and many in the 37th Ward conflated the two and had no problem allying themselves with Wal-Mart.

What Wal-Mart also found in West Chicago was nothing short of a natural extension of its corporate philosophy. Wal-Mart built a $285 billion corporation by going where its competitors are not. That used to be small towns or underserved suburbs. Chicago's 37th Ward, with its scant retail options, is an urban village, a first cousin to the sorts of communities Wal-Mart had always targeted. Combine the lack of jobs and stores with a strong antiunion streak, and the West Side is perfect for Wal-Mart. "If you're going to pick a spot, why wouldn't you go to the West Side?" asked Ronald Powell, president of the UFCW Local 881, which opposed Wal-Mart's entry into Chicago. "I don't think that there's any question that in the city we need jobs. But in the long term, for every one job Wal-Mart creates, they take away two."

By the the time it got to Chicago, Wal-Mart had learned something from its bad experience in Inglewood, where the retailer attempted to circumvent the city council by pushing for the necessary rezoning through a ballot referendum. Wal-Mart had then donated $65,000 to the Los Angeles Urban League and mounted a $1 million p.r. blitz. The locals got turned off by the attempted end-around play, and Wal-Mart lost the vote, with 60% of residents rejecting the store. Humbled, Scott changed the company's urban policy from one of remote maneuvering to direct community engagement--and made himself the point man. In 2003 Wal-Mart began its Good Jobs campaign, a series of ads featuring people, many of them minorities, extolling the virtues of Wal-Mart to the community (208,000 of Wal-Mart's 1.2 million workers are black).

Scott did an interview with black talk-show host Tavis Smiley, whose public-television show the company underwrites. Smiley concedes that Wal-Mart has issues, but says his relationship with the company--and particularly with Scott--has allowed him to raise those issues in private. "You need a good inside game and a good outside game," says Smiley. "I don't begrudge anybody in black America for working their outside game."

Over the past three years, Wal-Mart has set up minority scholarships for journalism at various universities, and in May Wal-Mart underwrote a documentary, on black soldiers who served in segregated units in different wars, that appeared on TV-ONE, a small cable channel geared to African Americans.