The City Council is poised to deny the zoning application needed by BJ’s Wholesale Club to open a store in the east Bronx. BJ’s is one of those “big box” stores that seem to have Gotham’s unions in a tizzy, for reasons we cannot fathom. Under the guise of mysteriously discovered traffic problems, the council’s land-use committee rejected what appears to us to be a perfectly reasonable application to build this new store in an otherwise underutilized commercial site. The local community and responsible public officials support the application. So what has gone wrong?

As all concerned will concede privately, the driving force in the rejection is not the automobile, but the fact that the workers at BJ’s would not be affiliated with a labor union. Because this has nothing to do with the land-use issue at hand, legal action against the city may well follow the expected rejection by the full council tomorrow. One would surmise that the more businesses that open here, the more opportunity there would be to organize workers. Certainly in a state and city so friendly to the labor movement, the employees at BJ’s will have the free choice to affiliate with a union or not.

But the influence of the labor movement here has apparently diminished so much that rather than attempt to organize workers in these stores, the unions simply lobby to prevent the jobs from coming here at all. Unfortunately, the council appears all too willing to join in this destructive strategy. The victims will be the legions of unemployed in the Bronx, many of whom would give anything to get their first break in the private-sector labor market. This has certainly been the experience at other recently opened businesses in the borough, where as many as 20 persons typically apply for each new position.

That this opportunity would be denied to the residents of this, the most economically deprived of the five boroughs, adds to the perverse nature of the council’s awful decision. In the Bronx, private sector jobs are desperately needed to jump-start a local economy too long dependent on public largesse. Three hundred jobs may be far short of the 100,000 jobs our Andrew Wolf suggests are ultimately needed to restore the Bronx to prosperity, but economic success is built incrementally.

Under an agreement negotiated by the president of the Bronx, Adolfo Carrion Jr., most of the jobs at BJ’s would go to borough residents. The question is not whether these stores will exist – they will, even if they are situated on the other side of the city line. By depriving New Yorkers of these jobs and consumers of the opportunity to seek lower prices closer to home, the council is institutionalizing failure, sacrificing our city’s economic prospects, and sending a negative message that will not be lost on those considering whether to locate their businesses in New York City. And people will start to wonder where were the mayor and the other senior leaders in the city when the chips were down.