Inglewood Delegation Tries to Air Concerns at Wal-Mart Conference

A delegation from Inglewood didn’t find exactly what it was shopping for Tuesday near the hometown of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Hoping to meet with Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr., the delegation -- which included an Inglewood city councilman, a minister and a member of the California Assembly -- was forced to settle for a brief encounter with two of the company’s corporate affairs executives at an Embassy Suites Hotel.

The hotel, a few miles from Wal-Mart’s Bentonville headquarters, was the site of a two-day conference organized by Wal-Mart as part of a national program to burnish its image and counter views that the world’s largest retailer -- and the nation’s biggest private employer -- skimps on wages and benefits while filling America’s suburbs with boxy warehouses and acres of parking lots.

Such complaints helped defeat a Wal-Mart-sponsored ballot initiative in Inglewood last year that would have eased the way for construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter near the Hollywood Park racetrack.

Members of the uninvited delegation, led by Assemblyman Jerome Horton (D-Inglewood) and Inglewood Councilman Ralph Franklin, hoped to “crash” this week’s event to publicize their complaints with the retailer. But after holding a sparsely attended news conference, the group got little more than a promise from the company that their request for a meeting would be passed on to Scott.

The group was later offered a chance to meet with two Wal-Mart executives today, but Scott would not be there.

“We are going to meet with them to see what they have to say,” said the Rev. Altagracia Perez of the Holy Faith Episcopal Church in Inglewood, but the group reiterated that nothing short of a binding agreement guaranteeing a “livable” wage, good healthcare and other benefits would win their support.

The group doesn’t speak for everyone in Inglewood. The campaigns both for and against the ballot initiative were intense, and opposing sides held street fairs, gave away food and offered free rides to the polls.

On Tuesday, during a question and answer session with the 50 or so reporters attending the event, Scott said Wal-Mart was “good for America” and proclaimed -- as he did during a recent appearance in Los Angeles -- that it had nothing to apologize for.

Scott also launched a broadside against his retail competitors and against organized labor.

“Union leadership, which is watching membership and dues shrink

The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents thousands of California supermarket workers, said Tuesday that a new website called wakeupwalmart.com was part of a campaign to make Wal-Mart upgrade its wage and healthcare benefits.

When asked about the company providing a so-called livable wage, Scott said that Wal-Mart and other retailers don’t have the kind of profit margins that allow them to bring workers into the middle class the way that manufacturing jobs did for earlier generations.

“Retail does not perform that role anywhere in the world,” he said.

*

Associated Press was used in compiling this report.