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By HENRY LOPEZ | The New Mexican
August 10, 2006
The Chicago City Council's recent adoption of a minimum-wage ordinance has
drawn more national attention to Santa Fe's
wage law.
Mayor David Coss will go to Chicago
next week to take part in a news conference scheduled by the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which helped push adoption
of the Santa Fe ordinance.
Coss will speak on Santa Fe's
experience and call on Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley to refrain from vetoing
an ordinance that councilors there adopted about two weeks ago.
The ordinance makes Chicago the
biggest U.S.
city to require large-scale retailers to pay a ``living wage.'' The law
affects retailers with more than $1 billion in annual sales and stores of
more than 90,000 square feet. Big-box chains such as Target and Wal-Mart
would be required to pay $10 an hour plus $3 in fringe benefits by mid-2010.
Daley has threatened a veto, which could be overridden unless two aldermen
drop their support for the law. Retail chains have threatened to not build
stores in Chicago, and a retailers organization has threatened a lawsuit.
Coss has been telling national news media that Santa Fe's
minimum-wage ordinance, which survived a court challenge, has not driven away
large-scale retailers. In addition, Lowe's Home Improvement Centers has a
store under construction off Cerrillos
Road and Wal-Mart plans to build a ``supercenter.''
In recent weeks, Coss has been interviewed by the Chicago Tribune, Houston
Chronicle and Time magazine. Cable network CNBC also interviewed Coss
regarding the ordinance two weeks ago.
``I think Santa Fe is a leader on
this issue, and we welcome being in the spotlight,'' said Coss, who as a city
councilor helped champion the ordinance.
The Chicago Tribune also recently contacted Carol Oppenheimer of Santa
Fe's Living Wage Network. ``People have looked to Santa
Fe and said, `Did the sky fall when you passed it?'
And the answer is the sky didn't fall,'' Oppenheimer said.
In late July, Houston Chronicle columnist Loren Steffy
wrote two columns on Santa Fe's
ordinance in which she recounted the controversy over its passage.
``When I went to Santa Fe to
study the issue,'' Steffy wrote. ``I thought the
living wage was about economics, but it isn't. The movement is a morality
play, and one that consistently generates overwhelming support.''
A January cover story in The New York Times Magazine traced the origins of
the Living Wage movement from a church-run soup kitchen in Baltimore
to its success in Santa Fe and
foreshadowed the Democratic Party's recent efforts to seize on the issue.
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