Grocery Workers

This chapter analyzes the labor movement’s challenge to retail giant Wal-Mart, which in 2002 announced plans to open forty Supercenters in California—threatening to undermine labor standards, and union strength, in the grocery sector. It focuses on the confrontation with Wal-Mart in the separately incorporated city of Inglewood, a historically working-class African American community in South Los Angeles. There, a community-labor coalition, led by LAANE, organized to stop Supercenter development through legislative and legal challenges—a technique known as a “site fight” because it aimed to block Wal-Mart at a specific location. The chapter examines three phases of the fight, tracing how the coalition mobilized law to defeat the Inglewood proposal, design innovative policies to limit Wal-Mart’s entry into the Los Angeles market, and thwart Wal-Mart’s effort to bypass those policies by opening a small-format grocery store in historic Chinatown. In evaluating the campaign, the chapter suggests that the outcome was, in part, a product of Wal-Mart’s political miscalculation: The company’s drive for a Supercenter in Inglewood failed despite evidence of public support, in large measure because of an ill-conceived attempt to gain voter approval through a city initiative that would have completely circumvented the local planning process. Yet Wal-Mart’s defeat was not merely self-inflicted. The company’s miscalculation of the local response to the initiative was politically consequential precisely because there was a sophisticated team of activists and lawyers who used Wal-Mart’s disregard of public input to successfully mobilize community opposition to the Supercenter and build new anti-big-box policy. In that sense, the presence of a political-legal support structure, with experience mounting development-oriented campaigns from the community benefits context, was essential to Wal-Mart’s defeat—strengthening grocery labor standards in Los Angeles going forward.