In recent months, Wal-Mart has renewed its push to build stores within New York City. Focusing on the outer boroughs and promising to bring smaller stores than their usual 180,000 square foot monsters, Wal-Mart's proposal at first looks reasonable — who wouldn't want to add jobs in this recession and bring in more consumer options? But a closer look reveals that Wal-Mart would do irreparable damage to New York City's neighborhoods, workers and economy.
While Wal-Mart claims it will create 500 jobs by locating its first store in East Brooklyn's Gateway II Center, estimates by community small businesses (based on case studies of what has happened when Wal-Mart moves into similar retail markets) show that it will in fact kill 2,000 jobs by destroying the network of small bodegas that make New York vibrant. These independent corner stores are a key part of New York City's economic fabric, and their independent nature adds variety to our streets and neighborhoods.
Owner-operated small businesses, especially when the owners live in the community, are key to ensuring that neighborhood businesses actually have an investment in their community. Wal-Mart, by offering lower prices than any independent retailer can because of economies of scale and labor policies that seem lifted from the fantasies of a gilded-age robber baron, will put hundreds of these bodegas out of business — eliminating jobs, emptying storefronts and robbing our streets and neighborhoods of their character.
Additionally, Wal-Mart is currently involved in the largest sex-discrimination case in history — a class-action lawsuit before the Supreme Court brought on behalf of 1.5 million female Wal-Mart employees who allegedly suffered systematic employment discrimination in pay and promotions during their tenure. The claims of bias are grave. The suit contends that the retailer's corporate culture is "rife with gender stereotypes demeaning to female employees ... women comprise over 80 percent of hourly supervisors, they hold only one-third of store management jobs, and their ranks steadily diminish at each successive step in the management hierarchy." Even without the economic disadvantages outlined above, no corporation with this record of gross labor violations should be welcomed into the New York City community.
Wal-Mart is bad for workers, bad for small business and bad for the New York City community. It should be kept out, even in the face of intense lobbying and political pressure. Allowing Wal-Mart into the city will sound a death toll for the thousands of small stores that help make this city great.
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