Exactly When Is a City Strong Enough to Spar With Walmart?

The D.C. Council passed a bill Wednesday night establishing a "living wage" within the city of $12.50 an hour – not for all workers, but for a narrow class of them employed in retail outlets larger than 75,000 square feet, working for companies with corporate sales of more than $1 billion. If these figures sound strangely specific, it's because they were designed with a particular company in mind that's often at war with labor activists: Walmart.

The national big-box brand that found its niche off suburban and rural highways has been trying to elbow into the much tighter, untapped urban market. More specifically, Walmart has been angling to get into D.C. for the last several years. The same critics who have turned up in other cities objected to the company's arrival, on political and philosophical and labor grounds. They ultimately managed to push this legislation, called the Large Retailer Accountability Act, which awkwardly defines a "living wage" at Walmart as $4.25 an hour more than what the city guarantees all its other workers (the D.C. minimum wage is $8.25, compared to $10.55 an hour in best-in-the-nation San Francisco).