Mayor May Not

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass argues that if the Laquan McDonald video had come out a year ago when the shooting actually happened, Rahm Emanuel would have been annihilated in the city's mayoral runoff election.

He's right.

If the video had been out, if Chicago had watched it before going to the polls, Emanuel would have lost the black vote. You'd have to be a meat puppet to think otherwise. And you're not a meat puppet, are you?

But just to make sure of my theory, I called the one guy who'd know: Cook County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, the mayor's opponent in the 2015 election.

"Yes," Garcia told me over the phone. "That video would definitely have changed the political environment.

"The rug would have been pulled out from under many political leaders' feet. Things would have been different," he said.

"And now, with the video out and people seeing it, everywhere I go people ask me about it. Everywhere I go people tell me it would have been a game changer. If people had seen it, they would have said, this city is so corrupt, it's time for a change."

But they didn't see it, until it was too late.

"There's just some basic Chicago arithmetic in there. He wouldn't have received as much votes from the African-American community," Garcia said. "It isn't rocket science. It's arithmetic. And so yes, this tragic video would have had a profound impact."

Which is why Rahm didn't want it to be seen, why he had to do everything to keep it under wraps. And he did do everything to keep it under wraps, until the other day.

"And that's the Chicago Way," Garcia said.

Yes it is.

Exit question:  Why is Rahm still Mayor now after this?

Holiday Long Read: Black Friday Blues

A short schedule this weekend as I'm taking it easy, but a not-so-subtle reminder that if you're hitting the stores today to get those low price holiday deals, remember the folks working today and the lengths that the largest retailer in the world will go to in order to keep those employees in check.

In the autumn of 2012, when Walmart first heard about the possibility of a strike on Black Friday, executives mobilized with the efficiency that had built a retail empire. Walmart has a system for almost everything: When there’s an emergency or a big event, it creates a Delta team. The one formed that September included representatives from global security, labor relations, and media relations. For Walmart, the stakes were enormous. The billions in sales typical of a Walmart Black Friday were threatened. The company’s public image, especially in big cities where its power and size were controversial, could be harmed. But more than all that: Any attempt to organize its 1 million hourly workers at its more than 4,000 stores in the U.S. was an existential danger. Operating free of unions was as essential to Walmart’s business as its rock-bottom prices.

OUR Walmart, a group of employees backed and funded by a union, was asking for more full-time jobs with higher wages and predictable schedules. Officially they called themselves the Organization United for Respect at Walmart. Walmart publicly dismissed OUR Walmart as the insignificant creation of the United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW) union. “This is just another union publicity stunt, and the numbers they are talking about are grossly exaggerated,” David Tovar, a spokesman, said on CBS Evening News that November.

Internally, however, Walmart considered the group enough of a threat that it hired an intelligence-gathering service from Lockheed Martin, contacted the FBI, staffed up its labor hotline, ranked stores by labor activity, and kept eyes on employees (and activists) prominent in the group. During that time, about 100 workers were actively involved in recruiting for OUR Walmart, but employees (or associates, as they’re called at Walmart) across the company were watched; the briefest conversations were reported to the “home office,” as Walmart calls its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

The details of Walmart’s efforts during the first year it confronted OUR Walmart are described in more than 1,000 pages of e-mails, reports, playbooks, charts, and graphs, as well as testimony from its head of labor relations at the time. The documents were produced in discovery ahead of a National Labor Relations Board hearing into OUR Walmart’s allegations of retaliation against employees who joined protests in June 2013. The testimony was given in January 2015, during the hearing. OUR Walmart, which split from the UFCW in September, provided the documents to Bloomberg Businessweek after the judge concluded the case in mid-October. A decision may come in early 2016. 

If you want to know why I've long stopped shopping at Wal-Mart, this is but one reason why.  The power it has over the American economy and the American worker is enormous. It employs 2.2 million people worldwide, more than the entire population of New Mexico, or the combined population of New Hampshire and Vermont.

They crush unions.  They crush the people in them.  They crush wages and lives.

And OUR Walmart was just another enemy to be crushed.

Enjoy those Black Friday deals, kids.  The people paying the price to bring them to you are the least able to afford it.