Zorn wonders if the giant retailers may be most worried that Chicago’s “big box ordinance” will work as planners intend - no current or prospective jobs lost and better lives for those who work at the stores. The proposed ordinance would kick the minimum wage up to $10 an hour with $3 in benefits by 2010. Zorn offers these reasons:

A similar though broader “living wage” ordinance took effect in Santa Fe, N.M., New Mexico, in 2004, and a follow-up study by the University of New Mexico found that private sector employment growth proceeded to outpace the overall growth in New Mexico, gross retail receipts grew faster than inflation and employment levels rose.

San Francisco raised the local hourly minimum wage to $8.82 (the federal minimum is stuck at $5.15) at about the same time, and economists at the University of California at Berkeley who studied the impact concluded that, “on the whole, the San Francisco economy has adjusted relatively easily to the citywide wage policy. The policy has generated the benefits that were desired by the voters and with surprisingly small costs.”

The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development recently reported that a 55 cent hike in that state’s hourly minimum last year resulted in an additional $175 million in payroll taxes and a $3 million rise uptick in state taxes.

Estimates from the pro-ordinance Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law are that there’s $1.3 billion in untapped consumer demand on the city’s South and West Sides. I don’t see the big-box boys walking away from that over a couple of bucks an hour that many of their employees already earn.

UPDATE: Were rally attendees tricked?

Meanwhile, residents at the Harold Ickes Homes on the city’s South Side said organizers opposing the ordinance tricked them last week into attending a rally of about 1,200 people, heavily covered by the media, by saying that jobs at Wal-Mart awaited them there.

The organizers, all employees of The Woodlawn Organization, knocked on doors last Thursday, instructing Ickes tenants to bring their resumes to a bus idling nearby, the residents said. The organization is contracted by the Chicago Housing Authority to help Ickes residents find employment.

“They said we were going to get some jobs, and when we got there, it was just a bunch of bull crap,” said Cheryl Brown, 24. “All they did was talk about how they were going to bring Wal-Mart to Chicago. People were mad.”

Finney, the organization’s director and pastor of the South Side church where the rally was held, denied that the gathering was stacked.

[Hat tip: IlDemNet]