LAANE and its allies are celebrating last week’s incredible victory over retail giant Wal-Mart in the city of Inglewood. On April 6, a Wal-Mart-sponsored ballot initiative was rejected by Inglewood voters in an election that was watched closely throughout the country and around the world. The election was seen as a test of the world’s largest corporation and its power to impose its will on communities.

Wal-Mart’s initiative, Measure 04-A, would have given the corporation carte blanche to develop a “supercenter” at a prime Inglewood site without any public oversight. That’s right: no review of construction drawings, no zoning compliance, no environmental review, no consideration of traffic impacts. The public and its elected representatives and the professional staff of the city would have been completely eliminated from the development process. Back to the days of the Wild West!

LAANE began organizing in Inglewood – a working-class city ten miles from downtown Los Angeles with a population almost evenly split among African-Americans and Latinos – over a year ago when we first learned that Wal-Mart had chosen the site for one of 40 proposed supercenters in California. We were concerned about Wal-Mart for a number of reasons:

• Wal-Mart pays substandard wages and benefits--its sales clerks, on average, fall below the federal poverty level--and is widely acknowledged as the driving force behind the “race to the bottom” that has added tens of millions of Americans to the ranks of the working poor.
  
  
• Wal-Mart competes unfairly with other businesses that pay living wages and even forces them to leave the area, thus replacing good jobs with bad (and, according to studies, at a 3 to 2 ratio).
  
  
• Wal-Mart has a terrible track record on a range of other related issues, from rampant violations of child labor and overtime laws to discrimination against women and people of color.
  
  
• Wal-Mart’s Inglewood ballot measure would have established a dangerous national precedent, allowing a private corporation to bypass all public control over large-scale development projects.

Consistent with our mission to promote quality jobs and community empowerment, we determined that – whatever the odds – we had to act to stem the tide of Walmartization in California.

Over a year-long period in 2003-2004, we organized the Coalition for a Better Inglewood (CBI), which brought together residents, clergy, labor, small business owners, and community organizations. When Wal-Mart collected enough signatures to place its initiative on the ballot, CBI and LAANE took the lead in opposing the measure. This effort included a legal challenge, political advocacy, on-the-ground organizing and media outreach, all of which laid the groundwork for our electoral campaign.

As the date of the vote neared, we stepped up our campaign, recruiting volunteers to phone-bank and precinct-walk, collecting endorsements (including every elected political official representing Inglewood except the mayor), utilizing high-profile spokespeople (including Jesse Jackson and Congresswoman Maxine Waters), and implementing an effective media strategy. Our work was helped significantly by a last-minute injection of support from the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which sent out a series of mailings and coordinated the precinct-walking operation.

In spite of our efforts, we feared the worst as Wal-Mart outspent our side 10 to 1. Wal-Mart sent a deluge of mailings beginning six weeks before the election, cleverly solicited absentee votes before our campaign was fully started, served free barbeque and donuts to voters, and even chauffeured van-loads of voters to the polls.

In the end, however, the voters of Inglewood were not hoodwinked. They voted the Wal-Mart measure down by a resounding 60% to 40% amid the largest turnout for a special election in the city’s history. Despite Wal-Mart’s almost unimaginable economic power, we showed that it can be defeated with a broad, non-traditional coalition.

We are very proud of our role in stopping Wal-Mart’s radical power grab. The importance of this victory around the globe is reflected in the media coverage, reaching from the BBC to the Wall Street Journal to the NPR weekly quiz show. Wal-Mart’s defeat was reported and commented upon in major newspapers worldwide, while the drop in the company’s stock the day after the election was attributed to the Inglewood vote. Equally gratifying were the many e-mails we received from Wal-Mart employees, business owners who lost their livelihoods to Wal-Mart, and residents who have seen their communities devastated by Wal-Mart.

This victory has created enormous momentum in the growing fight to hold Wal-Mart accountable to communities and working families. Over the next few months, LAANE will be talikng to individuals and organizations around the country to devise a national
Wal-Mart strategy. We’ll keep you posted.

Below are links to several articles along with samples of messages we received from people throughout the U.S.

As always, we share our victory with the generous foundations who make our very existence possible. Thanks for supporting LAANE.

Best Regards,
Madeline Janis-Aparicio

News from the Stop-Wal-Mart Campaign

Newsweek writes that instead of Wal-Mart descending on Inglewood and sweeping Main Street of mom-and-pop stores, the underdogs won. Some say a big reason for Wal-Mart's defeat was ill will over a recent supermarket strike regarding cuts in health-care benefits, which the chains' owners said were necessary to compete with Wal-Mart. More This New York Times editorial declares that the rapid proliferation of suburban big-box stores hit a pronounced bump when Wal-Mart failed in its aggressive effort to build a supercenter in suburban Los Angeles. The world's largest retailer spent $1 million on a ballot initiative and a charm offensive, but residents weren't buying. More This LA Times article reports that the bid by the world's largest corporation to bypass uncooperative elected officials and take its aggressive expansion plans to voters failed, as Inglewood residents overwhelmingly rejected Wal-Mart's proposal to build a colossal supercenter with no environmental review or public hearings. More News from the Financial Times of London says union and community activists in a Los Angeles suburb have chalked up a victory over Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, rejecting its plan to build a giant retail and grocery center. The mainly black and Latino residents voted two-to-one against the project. More

For more press coverage, visit the Stop Wal-Mart Press Room