Rewarding-Work

Target Corp. Blackmails Chicago to Scrap Living Wage Ordinance

As we highlighted [11] a few weeks ago, the Chicago City Council approved a groundbreaking ordinance to require all large retailers in that city to pay a living wage of $10 per hour plus $3 in benefits. 

In retaliation, the Target Corp. is making a blackmail threat to cancel the opening of stores in three predominantly African-American Southside Chicago neighborhoods unless the mayor vetoes the ordinance-- advocates for the Chicago law are calling on allies [12] to call Target's CEO and end this political bullying.  Adding to community anger is the fact that Target already operates seven stores in the city and opened one in a a predominately white Northside community just two weeks ago, leading to charges of discriminatory redlining by the corporation. 

What makes it clear that the threat is political blackmail and not merely a calculated business decision is the fact that the company admits [13] that its Chicago Lincoln Park store is its most successful in the country-- and economic analysts note that big box retailers have been pushing hard to get access to urban consumers in recent years: "I think Target is making these threats to try to scare Chicago into scrapping this law," said [14] Annette Bernhardt, deputy director of poverty programs at Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School. "Everyone knows they'll expand into the city. That's where the untapped market is."

Target already operates stores in cities like Sante Fe and San Francisco which have comparable minimum wage rates of $9.50 per hour and $8.82 per hour respectively, so the argument that the marginally higher wage rates in Chicago will make or break the new stores in that city is just not credible. 

Advocates are especially suspicious since Target is aiming to intimidate predominantly black communities and elected leaders with its threat, paralleling nasty threats [15] and racial manipulation [16] by Wal-Mart during that company's campaign to enter Chicago and fight the new ordinance.  In fact, the parallel is so close that advocates challenging Target have dubbed the company "Tar-Mart [17]" for resorting to the same kinds of heavyhanded tactics used by Wal-Mart that have angered so many community groups.

To protest this heavy-handed blackmail, use these resources to call [12] or write [18] Target CEO Robert Ulrich to demand that he stops these threats against the poor communities of Chicago.

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Rewarding-Work

Forcing Resignation through Abusive Treatment Equivalent to Discharge, Indiana Court Rules

For many workers facing discrimination, they are never officially fired but just face abusive treatment that makes quitting the only option.  In too many states, however, the legal rights of a worker to sue for discrimination under state law when facing an abusive workplace is unclear. 

Last week, an Indiana Appeals Court in Randy Tony v. Elkhart County [19] resolved some of the ambiguity in that state by ruling that such abusive treatment gives rise to what is legally known as "constructive discharge" and the right to sue an employer for illegal retaliation.  In this case, highway maintenance worker Randy Tony was injured on the job and, when he filed a worker compensation claim, faced ridicule and hostility from his supervisors and was purposefully assigned work he was unable to perform given his injuries, forcing him to resign.  

The Appeals Court ruled that when an employer creates "working conditions so intolerable as to force an employee to resign" in retaliation for exercising a statutory right such as filing for unemployment compensation, that employee should have the right to treat those actions as equivalent to being fired -- and have the legal recourse to sue under the law for retaliatory discharge.

The Supreme Court recently clarified [20] that under the federal Civil Rights Act, any downgrading of job quality against those who complain of discrimination is illegal retaliation.   So, it would serve employees better if parallel state anti-discrimination legislation was clearer that retaliatory workplace abuse was grounds for enforcing rights against discrimination.

In recent years, a number of statutes have been proposed to clarify state law on retaliation.  One of the most comprehensive was a proposed 2003 California bill, HB 1582 [21], which would have specified that it is unlawful to create an abusive workplace in retaliation against an employee who has opposed an unlawful employment practice or has made a charge, testified, assisted, or participated in an investigation or proceeding against an employer.

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