Wednesday, August 05, 2009

The Chicago Area Jobs Map

Members of the Chicago City Council, take a look at the map above. What do you see? You see 44 dots. Every dot is a Wal-Mart in the Chicago area. Every dot is a place where people go to work and draw a paycheck. Every dot produces sales tax revenue. Every dot caters to people who want to buy shoes and socks and TVs and tires and whatever else draws them to Wal-Mart. If we widened this map to take in all of Illinois, there would be 148 dots. If we widened it again to take in all of the U.S., there would be 3,514 dots.

So, aldermen. How's that campaign going to protect Chicagoans from the scourge of working for Wal-Mart?

Construction of the store would create 200 jobs. The store, once it was running, would provide nearly 500 jobs. But the City Council wants none of that, so all the Chicagoans who like to shop at Wal-Mart and all the Chicagoans who would like to work at Wal-Mart have to go to one of those dots on the map. They're all in the suburbs, save the one Wal-Mart that has been allowed to open in Chicago.

Organized labor doesn't like Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart doesn't have union jobs. It just has jobs (with an average hourly wage of $12.05 in Chicago). The aldermen, of course, already have jobs. They get paid $110,556 a year and they figure that as long as they keep the labor unions off their backs, they'll keep making $110,556 a year.

Who says the City Council doesn't generate jobs? If you're one of the 50 aldermen, your unemployment rate is 0 percent. But the unemployment rate for the rest of Chicago is above 10 percent. One in 10 Chicagoans is out of work. Many of the aldermen think that if you're a constituent and you're unemployed you can just go look somewhere else. You want to get a paycheck from Wal-Mart? Go take a hike to one of those dots on the map. Go take a hike to those clueless suburbs.

~Excerpts from today's
Chicago Tribune staff editorial

3 Comments:

At 8/06/2009 8:46 AM, Blogger misterjosh said...

While the Chicago city council is ridiculous, venal, selfish, and cowardly, this graphic is just silly.

Wal-Mart's great and all, but there are thousands of other places to buy stuff and thousands of other places to work.

The people of Chicago have spoken, and they want Wal-Mart. The city council should let this happen.

But we should all keep in mind that Wal-Mart is not the be all end all of shopping or employment.

 
At 8/06/2009 6:18 PM, Blogger sethstorm said...

Typical Bentonville. They want to try to get an audience that can't object. It's like Time Warner doing bandwidth cap testing in Beaumont to minimize/remove opposition.

Attack by targeting those who cant really choose an alternative and paint opposition as mobsters.

That's how they push through to any place that resists. They just find some way to separate the opposition from the people. It's not just Chicago, but the places they have managed to railroad their way past opposing citizens.

 
At 8/08/2009 6:16 PM, Blogger Allen said...

Is there a city in America that tries to dictate how it's citizens lives will be lived more than Chicago?

 

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