Wal-Mart won’t say how much it spent trying to influence the City Council’s vote on the big-box minimum-wage ordinance, which the aldermen passed 35-14 on July 26. But we can make an educated guess.
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David Vite, head of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, says his group hired lobbyists and a legal team to fight the ordinance, which will boost wages to $10 an hour plus $3 an hour in benefits by 2010, but that Wal-Mart paid for the barrage of advertising before the vote. The company’s ads appeared in the Tribune, Sun-Times, and Chicago Defender as well as on radio and TV stations. Eric Adelstein, partner at Adelstein/Liston media consultancy, which ran the Smoke-Free Chicago campaign that ended in the ban passed in December, says that advocacy campaigns in the city usually cost at least $1 million and that TV ads chew up the most funds–a typical ad run goes for $600,000.
According to campaign-finance data submitted to the state by Chicago aldermen, Wal-Mart contributed $5,000 in June to the 37th Ward’s Emma Mitts, a vehement opponent of the ordinance. (Mitts also received $1,000 from Wal-Mart in 2003.) The data don’t yet show that Wal-Mart directly gave money to any other aldermen who opposed the ordinance, and there’s no way to know how much the company spent on lobbyists buttonholing aldermen as well as journalists. It’s also not clear how much was spent on organizers bringing people out to pro-big-box rallies or on the T-shirts and signs handed out there. According to the Tribune, at a July 20 rally at the south side’s Metropolitan Apostolic Community Church, some participants said organizers had promised them jobs if they showed up and told them to bring resumes.
