jessica desvarieux: welcome to the real newsnetwork. i'm jessica desvarieux in baltimore. last week, washington, d.c., mayor vincentgray vetoed a living-wage bill that had been passed by the city council in july. the largeretailer accountability act requires retailers with corporate sales of $1 billion or moreoperating in d.c. locations of at least 75,000 square feet to pay their employers no lessthan $12.15 an hour. now joining us to discuss the d.c. city councilvote that took place on tuesday is mark brenner, who is the director of labor notes. thanks for being with us, mark. mark brenner: great to be here, jessica. thanksfor having me.
desvarieux: so, mark, in july the d.c. citycouncil passed the living-wage bill. essentially they got eight votes. but in order to passit this time around, they need nine. do you anticipate them being able to muster up enoughsupport to get this passed? brenner: quite the opposite. i think all the,you know, speculation is in the other direction, that they're going to actually lose some supportand that some of the people who voted in favor the first time are going to peel off in theveto override vote that's taking place. so, you know, all indications are that this isgoing to fail and that vincent gray is going to prevail, he's going to--you know, his overridewill stick. desvarieux: and if this fails, what will therepercussions be, especially for everyday
people? brenner: well, i think it says two things.number one, it really, you know, continues a disturbing trend that i think we've seenin other cities, chicago most notably, where big retailers, particularly walmart, are throwingtheir weight around and continue to be able to muscle the politicians at the local levelinto, you know, kind of a development policy that fits with their corporate agenda. sothat, of course, you know, just signals more corporate control of our political system,which is a bad thing for everyday folks. and, of course, the people who would havebenefited from this--you know, walmart is the largest corporation in the country. they'rethe second-largest corporation in the world.
they make over half a trillion dollars insales every year. they made over--almost $60 billion in profits last year. this is a companythat has--you know, they're swimming in money, and they're keeping it mostly for themselves.i mean, it's no surprise that the walmart heirs are, you know, three or four of thetop ten richest people in the country. and this is really just another indication ofthe sort of 1 percent versus the 99 percent, a company that doesn't even pretend that itcan't afford to pay $12.50 an hour. it just says, we don't have to, and we're going touse our political muscle to make sure that that stays true. desvarieux: and then what do you make of thatargument that consumers at the end of the
day will be paying more if walmart were topay its workers a living wage? what do you make of that? brenner: well, it's interesting you broughtthat up, jessica, because this is something that in another life when i was a researcherat the university of massachusetts we spent a lot of time looking at, what would be theimpact on consumers of living-wage ordinances, particularly for, you know, retail employerslike this. and there was a study about two years agolooking at this question about walmart nationally, like, what would actually happen if walmartwere forced to pay $12 an hour to all of their workforce, their national workforce. firstthing that we found in this study was that
it would benefit a whole lot of people. there'salmost 900,000 workers that work for walmart and make less than $12 an hour, and it wouldraise wages by almost $3.2 billion, which sounds like a huge number, right, $3.2 billion.first we've got to point out that it's less than a quarter of walmart's profits for lastyear. it's actually less than 20 percent of their profits, which were close to $16 billion.but even more important for consumers, it only adds up to about 1.1 percent of all thesales that the company recorded. so on average, raising wages to about $12 an hour at walmartwould really only raise costs by about $0.45 per shopping trip for walmart customers. so, you know, it's one of those situations,as we see with living-wage ordinances generally,
where the benefits are very concentrated,the costs are very dispersed. so it's really kind of a win-win. unfortunately, as we saidbefore, politically walmart is making sure that this is not going to happen. desvarieux: okay. and we should note thatthe d.c. public seems to be in favor of this living-wage bill. there was a survey recentlythat came out done by the hart research associates. they found that 58 percent of city residentssupported an override of gray's veto, while only 35 percent thought the veto should stand.so, mark, there are those that argue still that this bill is really more about tryingto harm walmart than really giving people a living wage, and some are even arguing thatcompetitors like giant and target, safeway,
and employers like that should be paying thatliving wage as well and the focus should really be on raising the minimum wage across theboard. what do you make of that? brenner: well, they're not mutually exclusive,of course, jessica. i'm all in favor of raising the city minimum wage. i know city counselortommy wells has actually suggested raising the minimum wage to $10.25 in the district.and i think that that couldn't happen fast enough. i mean, frankly, i've been involvedin the living-wage movement since the mid-1990s. you know. and after 15 years, i hate to saythat that we're still talking about, you know, $8, $9, $10 an hour. it's really unbelievablethat we've been working on this for so long and we're still asking for so little. so ithink, you know, the faster we can get up
to something closer to $15 or $20 an hour,which is what it really would cost, you know, what you'd really have to pay someone to actuallyafford to live in the district above the poverty line, you know, and in any kind of reasonablewhat you would call, like, living-wage job. that's what it would take. so i'm all in favorof raising the city-wide minimum wage. but i did want to say, in terms of is thisreally just a sort of, you know, punish walmart kind of city council ordinance, i disagree.i think that the standards are very transparent. we're going after big box retailers. i mean,these are some of the biggest companies in the country, in the world. they've made, youknow, outsized profits off of us, the consumer, for years and years and years, and they'reputting very little back into their workforce.
so it's about time that they, you know, didtheir share. and i think that as far as local businessesthat are already, you know, above the sales threshold and above the square footage threshold,they're going to be affected by this too. they just have a longer phase-in period, aboutfour years. but what nobody likes to talk about is thefact that a lot of these companies may not actually have to pay any more at all, becausethey're already unionized, you know, which is true of a lot of grocery stores, not somuch retail. and this is really just about in some ways leveling the playing field betweenthose companies which have already, you know, sort of figured out that you can run a successfulbusiness and pay people a living wage, and
companies like walmart could say, oh, youcan actually make a lot more in profits by, you know, going the low road and paying people$8.25 an hour. desvarieux: okay. well, thank you so muchfor joining us, mark. brenner: great to be here, jessica. thanksfor having me. desvarieux: and thank you for joining us onthe real news network.
