Let Wal-Mart Realize King's Dream
Detroit Free Press - April 8, 2005
By Rev. James m. Lawson Jr.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 37 years ago on April 4 while in Memphis fighting for the rights of impoverished sanitation workers.

If King were alive today, I believe he'd be in Bentonville, Ark.

That's where a group of community leaders from Inglewood, Calif., are taking a challenge to Wal-Mart -- a $288 billion company that has positioned itself squarely in the path of workers and communities seeking to realize King's dream of civil and economic equality.

While the blatant discrimination of the civil rights era has faded, a quieter form of injustice is rippling out of Bentonville (Wal-Mart's headquarters) to the more than 3,500 Wal-Mart stores operating in all 50 states.

Many Wal-Mart workers are struggling to stay out of poverty. Wal-Mart claims its average wage is $9.68 an hour, which means a full-time worker (34 hours a week is full time at WalMart), makes $17,114 per year -well below the 2005 federal poverty level for a family of four. State governments are doling out hundreds of millions of dollars a year to many Wal-Mart employees in public assistance so they can get basic health care, and other benefits for themselves and their children.

Last year, Inglewood became a symbol of grassroots opposition to Wal-Mart when it rejected the retail giant's attempt to build a Supercenter. Wal-Mart went over the heads of city officials by ramming through a ballot initiative to approve construction of one of its Supercenters. This initiative would have created a virtual state-within-a-state, unlimited to public oversight.

Fortunately, a coalition of community leaders, clergy, workers, local business owners and concerned residents organized, and together we overwhelmingly defeated this initiative.

Our victory sent a clear message to Wal-Mart about the kind of economic development that Inglewood and other urban communities need -- development that respects our fundamental democratic rights and addresses the real needs of residents. Undaunted, Wal-Mart acquired the land where it attempted to build a year ago and is expected to submit its new plans any day.

In response, a delegation of Inglewood clergy, workers and elected officials recently traveled to Bentonville, where Wal-Mart was staging a two-day public relations extravaganza for the national media. These leaders want CEO Lee Scott to understand that Wal-Mart doesn't have an image problem -- it has a reality problem.

They challenged Wal-Mart to negotiate and sign a community benefits agreement -- a legally binding contract that protects the interests of communities. These agreements -- which some of the largest developers in the world, as well as the federal government, have signed -- guarantee a range of protections for working people: living-wage jobs, affordable family health care, fair pension benefits, job training and advancement, freedom from retaliation and basic rights on the job. They also safeguard the interests of small businesses and ensure that large development projects do not increase crime, traffic, noise and pollution.

King's "Poor Peoples Campaign" made the vital connections between the struggle for civil rights, freedom, economic justice and equality. It was King who said, "To deprive a man of a job or income, you are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- denying, in his case, the very creed of his society."

Across the country, Wal-Mart is now seen by many as the symbol of corporate disdain for the basic American values of dignity and fairness that King fought so hard to defend.

Jesus said, "The laborer deserves his wages."

Until Wal-Mart deals with its track record of poverty wages and inadequate health care, as well as the destruction of locally owned and minority businesses and the myriad other negative impacts it brings to communities, it will never win the hearts and minds of Inglewood residents -or those of millions of other Americans.

The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Los Angeles, and Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, was a working colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from 1957 to 1968. Write to him at pmproj@progressive.org or at the Progressive Media Project, 409 E. Main St., Madison, Wis. 53703.