The Community Values Ordinance: Holding Wal-Mart Accountable to Community Values and Vision

author : Susan Bee topic : Wal~Mart | Community Values Ordinance

by Susan Bee

Many local people want a healthy local economy in which hard-working people, operating within a free market, can succeed. They want good jobs paying a living wage and providing health-care benefits. They do not want companies to violate environmental or labor laws or to infringe on employees' and customers' civil rights. Further, they like, and want to support, local and independent family-owned businesses. They believe in democracy: a system in which those affected by the rules make the rules. They believe in the right of self determination: a community's right to decide what it will look like in 50 years, not in the right of some large corporation to come in and make these decisions for them. These are our values -- our community values.

The Community Values Ordinance, introduced in Olympia and Tumwater, is all about achieving these values and achieving a democratic system of citizen self-determination. Under the ordinance, large corporations above a certain size threshold would be unable to obtain a local business license needed to enter or remain in the city if their demonstrated business practices are inconsistent with our values: supporting local independent businesses, good U.S. manufacturing jobs, thriving local economies, living family wages and fair worker treatment, and upholding labor and environmental laws and citizen civil rights.

The ordinance creates a community values report card to score businesses to determine if they meet our minimum standards and community values. The corporation must complete a questionnaire that is plugged into the report card. If a passing score is achieved, the license is granted. If not, the company would either be denied the opportunity to locate here or, if already here, forced to leave town The program's administrative expense would be paid for by the corporations through a fee structure. In addition, a citizen-suit provision would allow local citizens to assure their ordinance is being properly administered.

A perfect example of the kind of corporation the CVO will target is Wal-Mart. In contrast to locally-owned businesses, having owners that live in and value the community from which they profit, Wal-Mart has a net balance of zero values. It possesses one singular goal . . . to make money. By design, corporations like Wal-Mart are money-making machines, accountable solely to shareholders. They are not accountable to their workers, the environment, local economies, or communities. The nationally embraced corporate governance principle of "shareholder primacy" ensures this; company managers must focus on maximizing shareholder profit, regardless of the societal costs (environmental hazards, lack of healthcare, poverty wages . . . ) that are a direct result of their management decisions. This is why corporations lobby government for weaker labor and environmental laws. It's also why corporations break these laws when they can get away with it. They have no values . . . no conscience. If they were people, they would be diagnosed as psychopaths.

Wal-Mart's record proves it is the best of the best at increasing shareholder profit to the detriment of the environment, working Americans, and even the American economy. Wal-Mart does not pay a living wage or provide meaningful health care benefits. It teaches its employees how to get on welfare. It has a no-tolerance union policy. It has taught managers nationwide how to cheat employees out of overtime pay. It sells mostly cheap goods made in communist China where workers can not organize and demand fair wages. It refuses to pay U.S. manufacturers a fair price, forcing them to locate overseas. Due to this record, many communities call Wal-Mart the worst of the worst and refuse to let Wal-Mart into their town.

Unfortunately, these communities have chosen to fight Wal-Mart with methods that are often ineffective and usually miss the point. Communities often challenge Wal-Mart with zoning, traffic, or retail-size limits and quickly drain their financial reserves litigating in a complex regulatory arena over traffic, for example. This may work in round one. But what happens the next year when Wal-Mart updates its application with improved traffic mitigation? Wal-Mart wins. This scenario has played itself out time and again across our nation.

The approach used in the traffic scenario is a "harms-based" approach in which the question being asked is "how much must we let the corporation harm us . . . how much traffic must we endure?" This approach is often unsuccessful in the long term, and it also misses the point. Most communities do not fight Wal-Mart due to traffic impacts; they fight because Wal-Mart's business practices are in extreme conflict with the community's values.

Citizen activists nationwide are changing their approach from "harm based" to "rights based". They are demanding to exercise their democratic right of self-determination by holding corporations accountable to the values and vision of the communities from which they profit. This not-so-new approach, which was used by the founding fathers in the declaration of independence, was re-born in rural Pennsylvania. There, community organizers protected their quality of life by passing similar CVO's that successfully stopped industrial hog farms, sewage sludge spreading on farmland, and gargantuan rock quarries.

The Community Values Ordinance is quintessential rights-based activism. The battle is framed in favor of local communities seeking to protect their way of life, and boils down to the citizens' right of self-governance versus the corporation's privilege to plunder for profit. Wal-Mart may challenge the ordinance using the legal doctrine of "corporate personhood." Under this claim, corporations argue they have the same civil rights we do: free speech, free association, equal protection, unimpeded interstate commerce, or due process. Wal-Mart may argue that it is beyond our democratic authority to curb its bad actor status in our communities. Unfortunately for democracy and most of America, Wal-Mart's corporate civil rights supercede citizen civil rights.

In an era where federal and state governments are "of, by, and for the corporations" instead of "of, by and for "the people", local government is now the last stand. Citizens still have a measure of influence in local government, so it is here we must draw the line. Ask your city council to pass the Community Values Ordinance. Request that it stand up for local independent businesses, the worker next door, and pleasant neighborhoods, instead of company-managed towns. Insist that government protects and serves democracy, its local citizens, and their vitally important community values.

To learn more about the Community Values Ordinance and about local citizen democracy, visit: http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/Olympia and click on item number 10.3.