Build another Chicago Wal-Mart

Chicago's unemployment rate is over 10 percent. Yet the Chicago City Council, which is more interested in placating its union financiers, doesn't want a second one.

In the rest of Illinois, there are 148 Wal-Marts.

The Chicago Tribune, in an op-ed, talks a lot of sense about the retail king and the city:

Last week, the City Council did what it does best: pass the buck. An ordinance that would open the way for a Wal-Mart Supercenter on the South Side skipped from the Rules Committee to the Finance Committee, where it is likely to settle in for a long winter's rest. Finance Committee Chairman Ed Burke (14th) and other council leaders appear to be in no hurry to let the Wal-Mart ordinance escape to a vote on the floor of the council.

Construction of the store would create 200 jobs. The store, once it was running, would provide nearly 500 jobs.

But the City Council wants none of that, so all the Chicagoans who like to shop at Wal-Mart and all the Chicagoans who would like to work at Wal-Mart have to go to one of those dots on the map. They're all in the suburbs, save the one Wal-Mart that has been allowed to open in Chicago.

When that Chicago store opened in 2006, it was flooded with applicants for 450 jobs. But the aldermen want to dodge a vote to allow another Wal-Mart -- the first on the South Side -- because they're petrified over the influence of organized labor on local elections.

Those construction jobs are likely to be union ones.

Build the second Wal-Mart. And a third...fourth...

And that Wal-Mart in the picture? It's in Niles, less than a mile from Chicago's city limits. A portion of the tax from each sale goes to Niles. The parking lot is filled with cars with Chicago vehicle stickers.

Niles says "thank you."

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Technorati tags: Wal-Mart unions labor politics retail business democrats big box organized labor