February 1st, 2010

Living Wage Action Alert:

February 1st, 2010

Living Wage Action Alert:

We expect that the proposed Wal-Mart supercenter will come before the Rohnert Park planning commission and city council in mid to late March. Please check this web site for further updates and see below for more information about our campaign to oppose the supercenter.
To view the presentation by Historian Nelson Lichtenstein at Copperfield's Books in Santa Rosa on Friday,January 22 about his new book: The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created A Brave New World of Business please click here:

http://empirereport.org/reports/20100127-the-brave-new-world-of-business

To download a petition opposing the proposed Wal-Mart supercenter in Rohnert Park please click here.

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The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business

By Nelson Lichtenstein
(Metropolitan Books, Hardcover,  320pp.)

The definitive account of how a small Ozarks company upended the world of business and what that change means

Wal-Mart, the world's largest company, roared out of the rural South to change the way business is done. Deploying computer-age technology, Reagan-era politics, and Protestant evangelism, Sam Walton's firm became a byword for cheap goods and low-paid workers, famed for the ruthless efficiency of its global network of stores and factories. But the revolution has gone further: Sam's protégés have created a new economic order which puts thousands of manufacturers, indeed whole regions, in thrall to a retail royalty. Like the Pennsylvania Railroad and General Motors in their heyday, Wal-Mart sets the commercial model for a huge swath of the global economy.

In this lively, probing investigation, historian Nelson Lichtenstein deepens and expands our knowledge of the merchandising giant. He shows that Wal-Mart's rise was closely linked to the cultural and religious values of Bible Belt America as well as to the imperial politics, deregulatory economics, and laissez-faire globalization of Ronald Reagan and his heirs. He explains how the company's success has transformed American politics, and he anticipates a day of reckoning, when challenges to the Wal-Mart way, at home and abroad, are likely to change the far-flung empire.

Insightful, original, and steeped in the culture of retail life, The Retail Revolution draws on first hand reporting from coastal China to rural Arkansas to give a fresh and necessary understanding of the phenomenon that has transformed international commerce.

Nelson Lichtenstein is one of the country's leading experts on labor and politics and the editor of a much-cited collection of essays on Wal-Mart. A professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy, he is also the author of several highly regarded books on American history, including the award-winning 'Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit' and 'State of the Union: A Century of American Labor.'
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Santa Rosa Press Democrat
Thursday, September 24, 2009

Critics Raise Their Voices Against Rohnert Park Wal-Mart plan

by Bob Norberg

Wal-Mart's proposal to add a supermarket to its Rohnert Park store was opposed Thursday by critics who said it offers low wages and few benefits to workers and will have a negative effect on other merchants.

"It's a bad idea that couldn't get worse," said Dawna Gallagher, one of several who spoke at a hearing on the project's draft environmental impact before the city's Planning Commission.

Retail giant Wal-Mart is proposing to supersize its Rohnert Park store by adding a 35,000-square-foot grocery store that could open as early as 2011.

Wal-Mart's low prices could be a boon to shoppers, who in interviews at several Rohnert Park stores this week said that during this recession, the cost of groceries is more important than ever.

Thursday night, however, it was only opponents who spoke during the 45-minute hearing. No representative of Wal-Mart spoke.

Wal-Mart is proposing adding 35,000 square feet to its Rohnert Park store for a full-size grocery store, making the facility into the only Wal-Mart Supercenter in Sonoma County. It would have 167,000 square feet.

The environmental impact report estimated a Rohnert Park supercenter would generate about an additional $23 million a year in sales, drawing business from existing stores in a trade area in which $263 million was spent on groceries in 2008.

The grocery store would be smaller than the Raley's, Safeway and Food Maxx stores now in Rohnert Park, about the same size as Oliver's Market in Cotati, but larger than most other locally owned stores, such as Pacific Market.

The larger Wal-Mart would draw most of its grocery shoppers from Rohnert Park, Cotati, Petaluma, Sebastopol and Santa Rosa and generate an additional 11,900 trips to Wal-Mart a week, according to the report.

The consultant said that it would worsen already bad traffic that clogs the freeway and causes backups at traffic lights, which will be significant and unavoidable.

"It would be a greenhouse gas disaster," Gallagher said.

Marty Bennett, co-chairman of the Sonoma County Living Wage Coalition, referenced the work of researchers at the New York University Brennan Center who said Wal-Mart's wages are 26 percent less than other grocery stores and less than half of the workers have health care benefits.

"Wal-Mart will impose substantial costs on this city and county," Bennett said.

Phil Jehly of Rohnert Park, a Raley's employee and union member, said that with six stores already in the area, another grocery store is not needed and would only jeopardize those jobs.

"There is no unmet demand. No extra sales will be made with a new store," Jehly said.

Lisa Maldonado of the North Bay Labor Council said that because the added sales at Wal-Mart would be food, which is not taxable, there is also no extra revenue generated for the city.

"You are taking away food that is sold at locally owned stores, and you have all the extra infrastructure costs," Maldonado said.

The report states that the earliest that construction could begin is early 2011, and that the work could take up to a year.

The store opened in 1992 and a second Wal-Mart opened in 2000 in Windsor. The nearest Wal-Mart Supercenter now is in American Canyon in Napa County.

The public's comments will be incorporated into a final report, which will be resubmitted to the Planning Commission and City Council. If approved, it will pave the way for a decision on the project itself.
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http://empirereport.org/reports/20090919-down-the-wal-mart-low-road-what-are-the-costs-of-a-supercenter

Empire Report
September 18, 2009

Down the Wal-Mart Low Road: What Are the Costs of a Supercenter?

by Martin J. Bennett

Wal-Mart recently announced plans to convert its existing discount store in Rohnert Park to Sonoma County's first 'supercenter.' Many cash-strapped cities are tempted to hastily approve retail projects that can generate- substantial sales tax revenue given the current economic downturn. However, we should pause to consider, not only the benefits, but also the costs of the proposed supercenter for Rohnert Park and Cotati.

In late January or early February, the Rohnert Park City Council will consider Wal-Mart's application to expand the existing Wal-Mart discount store in that city to a supercenter.

A supercenter is a 200,000 square foot store that sells both general merchandise and groceries. Since 1988, Wal-Mart has opened 2300 supercenters nationwide. Wal-Mart announced in 2002 that it would build more than forty of these megastores in California. By 2008 thirty-one were built, with organized grassroots opposition and environmental lawsuits blocking the others.

Wal-Mart is now the nation's largest grocer and pharmacy, with sales exceeding the combined total of major competitors, including Target, Safeway, Albertsons, Kohl's, and Kroger. How did Sam Walton develop a rural, southern discount store into the planet's largest retailer and the nation's largest employer?

According to UC Santa Barbara historian Nelson Lichtenstein in his new book, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created A Brave New World of Business, the main reason for Wal-Mart's phenomenal success is containment of labor costs by a relentless downward pressure on wages and benefits, and a near-perfect record thwarting unionization.

Most Wal-Mart workers are the 'working poor' in America. According to the company's own reports, the average wage for a full-time Wal-Mart worker in 2007 was $10.51 an hour. The average wage of a Wal-Mart employee is 26 percent less than other large merchandise stores, and 18 percent less than large grocery stores, according to the New York University Brennan Center.

Kaiser Family Foundation reports that less than 50 percent of Wal-Mart employees receive health-care benefits. Full-time workers must wait six months to receive medical benefits, and part-time workers wait two years. Half the work force turns over annually. As a result, part-time employees, who are more than one third of the work force, rarely receive benefits. For others, high deductibles, copays, and coverage limitations make the company-provided health plan unaffordable.

Wal-Mart ensures that wages and benefits remain low by a systematic, company-wide policy to suppress unions. A report by Human Rights Watch about Wal-Mart concluded, "while many American companies use weak U.S. laws to stop workers from organizing, the retail giant stands out for the sheer magnitude and aggressiveness of its anti-union apparatus."

Between 1998-2003 the National Labor Relations Board issued 94 complaints and found that Wal-Mart illegally fired workers for union activity, forced workers to attend anti-union meetings and video screenings, spied on workers who supported unionization, and claimed workers would lose pay raises and benefits or the store would shut down if the employees voted for a union.

Not one Wal-Mart store is unionized in the U.S. When Quebec workers voted for representation by the United Food and Commercial Workers in 2005, the company closed the store.

What are the costs when a Wal-Mart supercenter opens in a community?

First, good middle-class jobs are replaced by poverty-wage jobs. Grocery prices at Wal-Mart are 15 percent lower than those of competing firms, and half of these major grocery chains, like Safeway, Raley's, and Albertsons, are unionized. The 'union premium' for combined pay and benefits is 30 percent more than nonunion. In Southern Nevada, Wal-Mart opened sixteen supercenters, and by 2002 1400 union jobs were lost when Raley's closed eighteen stores. According to Nelson Lichtenstein, 13,000 traditional supermarkets were closed and twenty-five regional chains forced into bankruptcy from 1992-2003 due to Wal-Mart.

Second, the taxpayers end up providing public assistance for Wal-Mart workers. A 2004 study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, "The Hidden Costs of Wal-Mart," concludes that uninsured Wal-Mart employees in California rely on programs like Medi-Cal and Healthy Families at a cost of $32 million a year to the taxpayer. The report also demonstrates that Wal-Mart workers earning poverty wages rely on federal and state programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, Food Stamps, Section 8 subsidized housing, and child-care assistance to make ends meet, at a cost of $54 million per year.

Third, local merchants are hurt when Wal-Mart enters a community. In 1995, economist Kenneth Stone found that, a decade after the opening of a Wal-Mart in rural Iowa, 60 percent of the retail sales captured by Wal-Mart came from existing retailers. Hundreds of grocery, apparel, hardware, and drug stores closed. University of Missouri economist Emek Basker examined county-level employment impacts of Wal-Mart from 1977-1998. She demonstrated that, for every one hundred new jobs created by Wal-Mart, fifty retail jobs and twenty wholesale jobs were lost over the next five years.

Moreover, a 2007 study by UC Berkeley economists Arin Dube and T. William Lester calculated that, "every new Wal-Mart in a county reduced the combined or aggregate earnings of retail workers by around 1.5 percent" as competition from Wal-Mart decreases both average pay rates and total employment in the local retail sector.

Sonoma State students employed in grocery and retail will be directly affected by a new Wal-Mart supercenter: stores nearby such as Pacific Market will certainly close, as the draft EIR notes. Raley's and Oliver's will face stiff competition from the supercenter while employee earnings will decline across the retail sector in Rohnert Park and Cotati.

This is an appropriate moment for an informed public dialogue, and a county -wide mobilization to oppose the megastore proposed for Rohnert Park. The Living Wage Coalition has joined with independent grocers and small businesses in Rohnert Park, the North Bay Labor Council, Sonoma County Conservation Action, the Sierra Club Sonoma Group, Go Local Sonoma County and the United Food and Commercial Workers to urge that the Rohnert Park City Council deny Wal-Mart's application for a supercenter.

The exact dates and times for the Rohnert Park planning commission and city council to consider the proposed supercenter will be posted at this web site in January. Please attend the meetings and express your opposition to supercenter.

Martin J. Bennett teaches American history at Santa Rosa Junior College, serves as a Co-Chair of the Living Wage Coalition and on the Executive Board of the North Bay Labor Council.
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For more information about our Wal-Mart supercenter campaign click on "Community Labor- Alliances."

For fact sheets on Wal-Mart wages, health benefits, public subsidies provided to Wal-Mart workers, violations of labor and health and safety laws, opposition to unions, gender discrimination, demands on city police services, etc. please go to:

http://wakeupwalmart.com/

For recent reports on the community impacts of Wal-Mart and current information about local organizations and coalitions across the country engaged in 'site fights' against proposed Wal-Mart stores go to:

http://walmartwatch.com/