Chicago may make 'big box' retailers toe wage line

The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Chicago would become the nation’s first major city to establish a wage and benefit standard for “big-box” retailers, under a watered-down ordinance advanced Wednesday that threatens to undermine Wal-Mart’s urban expansion plan.

Wal-Mart said last week that Chicago could be home to as many as 20 new Wal-Mart stores over the next five years, but only if the big-box ordinance is defeated.

On Wednesday, the City Council’s Finance Committee ignored that warning, emboldened by a new poll that shows that 84 percent of Chicagoans favor wage and benefit standards for retailing giants, even at the risk of losing jobs.

The version approved by a vote of 15 to 6 includes a minimum wage standard of $10-an-hour that would kick in after 90 days on the job and $3-an-hour in benefits that workers would receive after 180 days on the payroll.

But, instead of applying that standard to newly built and existing stores with at least 75,000 square feet of space, the store size was raised to 90,000 square feet. Small vendors renting less than 50 percent of the space inside big-box stores would be exempt from the standard.

You'd think that a city that has its' own hiring practices questioned by the federal government shouldn't exactly be be the ones telling people how to hire.But,Chicago politicians being shameless could care less if the ordinance is unconstitional.Maybe if Wal-Mart sucked up to the Chicago Outfit they wouldn't have problems in Chicago.