Wal-Mart names nine more cities for jobs building program

The first city that will benefit from Wal-Mart's jobs building program is Chicago, which Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott announced last year. The other nine were named today.

From AP:

In April, Wal-Mart Chief Executive Lee Scott said the company planned to build 50 stores in areas with high crime or high unemployment. At the store on Chicago's west side, and at the nine identified Monday, Wal-Mart will offer advertising to the other businesses in local newspapers and through the pulbic address systems in Wal-Mart stores.

At each of the stores, five small businesses will be picked each quarter for special treatment, the ultimate focus of which will be "how to take advantage of having a Wal-Mart in your market," Menzer said.

Near the Chicago store — the first in the city limits for the retail giant — Menzer said a number of new businesses are under development nearby, including a coffee shop, a drugstore and a home improvement center.

"It could be any type of small business in the area that would draw on our traffic," Menzer said.

The Chicago store is in Chicago's poverty-stricken and retail starved Austin neighborhood. When Wal-Mart's first Chicago store opened there last fall, people were lined up around the block to get inside on the morning of the grand opening.

Did some Austin businesses fail because Wal-Mart arrived? Maybe a few. But it couldn't be more than that, because Chicago's West Side for the most part is a retail desert.

Now Wal-Mart is working to create more jobs in areas like Chicago's West Side.

In two weeks the first round of Chicago municipal elections will be held. The Chicago Federation of Labor and the Service Employees International Union is sending foot soldiers to selected city wards where the aldermen didn't cave in to labor's threats to vote in favor of the jobs-killing big-box "living wage" ordinance.

One of those wards is the 16th, where Shirley Coleman is the alderman. It's located on the Chicago's South Side, in another poor part of the city. She voted against the "living wage" bill, and the CFL and the SEIU have targeted her for defeat. Organized labor, particularly the well-paid building trades which make up a big chunk of the CFL, have a rotten history when it comes welcoming blacks and other minorities into its membership. Coleman's ward is overwhelmingly African-American.

I'm sure those union foot soldiers are getting an earful from the residents of the 16th Ward, as well as some other parts of the city.

Hat tip to Marshall Manson of Edelman Public Relations for the AP story.

Technorati tags: unions labor Wal-Mart Chicago retail business jobs elections politics