Common sense on Wal-Mart.

THANK you Bernie Parks.

At least one politician in the city of Los Angeles is willing to take the side of big, bad Wal-Mart as the retail colossus seeks to gain a foothold in Southern California.

And what are those fiends from Bentonville, Ark., after? They have the nerve of wanting to come into our lower-income communities, put up stores that sell low-cost merchandise, create hundreds of new jobs for folks in desperate need of work, and generate millions of dollars in sales tax revenues.

How dare they!

Parks, an L.A. city councilman and mayoral candidate, was alone in opposing an ordinance requiring special economic impact studies to be conducted before Wal-Mart can open supercenters in Los Angeles--what essentially amounts to a "not in our city" message because of the hoops retailers would be required to go through.

Orchestrating the opposition were labor activists masquerading as economic development experts who claim that having Wal-Marts is actually more harmful to the economy than not having them at all. Most everyone on the council bought into this nonsense--as did the ever-obedient James Hahn, who is desperate to stay on the good side of his labor buddies.

Only Parks, who happens to represent a district that's lost thousands of jobs over the last decade, steered clear. In so doing, he was obviously looking to attract businesspeople to his fledgling campaign, but here was a case where political strategy meshed with common sense.

Wal-Mart has made some headway in its expansion campaign into California, most recently in the community of Rosemead, where the City Council voted unanimously to open a supercenter (the kind that carries groceries and which has been at the center of the debate). But why wouldn't it? Having a Wal-Mart will add $600,000 a year in annual sales tax receipts--hardly chump change for a city whose tax receipts total $3 million--not to mention that between 325 and 500 jobs would be created. And as it happens, Rosemead has been without a major supermarket since its Ralphs closed.

Yet, for the occasional inroads being made in smaller communities, Los Angeles remains the big catch. Here, the opposition centers on Wal-Mart paying significantly lower wages and benefits than unionized supermarkets do. Health benefits are so meager, the unions claim, that the state ends up forking over tens of millions of dollars annually in aid. Wal-Mart disputes those numbers.

Here's what's really going on: Organized labor wants Wal-Mart to pay wages and benefits more in line with the supermarket chains, but that's not about to happen because by doing so the company would eat into its earnings. And, like it or not, Wal-Mart executives don't believe that the value of its employees exceeds a certain price point. That's obviously struck a chord among the supermarket chains, which came out of their recent contract talks with a labor deal that allows them to better compete with Wal-Mart.

While this provides one more incentive for the unions, keeping Wal-Mart's $9-an-hour wages out of Los Angeles won't suddenly lead to $18-an-hour wages.

Actually, Bernie Parks said it well in a letter to our newspaper: "As opponents of Wal-Mart preach to you about the shortcomings of a $9-an-hour job, they conveniently forget to mention the inarguable shortcomings of having no job at all," he wrote. "Many areas of Los Angeles don't have loads of stores or jobs to begin with. So what exactly are these "Big Box' stores driving away? To put it simply, if you had nothing and you get nothing, you still have nothing."

Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal.