Liberals generally don’t care for Wal Mart. In fact, egged on by the left-wing Green “Chamber of Commerce,” the Las Cruces City Council recently rejected a proposal to rezone some land for a Wal-Mart.
According to an editorial from the Las Cruces Sun-News, the City Council denied the re-zoning even though the change had been approved 6-0 by the Planning and Zoning Commission, and even though the nature of that part of town is clearly changing from farmland to growing neighborhoods in need of retail services.
So, Las Cruces is now too good for Wal Mart. Of course, Albuquerque’s City Council made a similar anti-Wal-Mart decision a few years back, so perhaps it is just a generally anti-business attitude that permeates this state and makes us poor? Nah, couldn’t be.
Elsewhere, however, labor unions are positively IN LOVE with Wal Mart. The unions are asking the National Labor Relations Board to force Wal-Mart to reinstate employees at five stores, accusing the retailer of closing the locations to retaliate against workers for attempts to organize for better pay and benefits.
Wal-Mart Stores had announced that it was temporarily closing five stores in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida and California to fix plumbing issues.
Another story about the closed Wal Marts made it seem like the city of Pico Rivera, CA, would wither away if their now-closed Wal Mart doesn’t reopen. According to the LA Times, the Mayor Gregory Salcido said:
“It’s a severe blow to our community, certainly, with the local economy, the homes and families, in terms of those people that were counting on those paychecks.” With 530 workers, the Wal-Mart store is the city’s second-biggest employer, topped only by the El Rancho Unified School District. Pico Rivera’s nearly 64,000 residents have a median household income of almost $57,000, about average for the county. Salcido estimated that Pico Rivera receives about $1.4 million a year in tax revenue from the retailer, potentially 10% of the city’s sales tax revenue. City officials, he said, are trying to figure out how to deal with the lost revenue if the store remains closed for at least six months, as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has announced.
Of course, the unions aren’t benevolently attempting to reopen the store to help the town of Pico Rivera. They believe that Wal Mart fired the workers for attempting to unionize.
Perhaps this would be an appropriate place to note that Wal Mart is indeed good for workers.