CHICAGO – Wal-Mart Stores’ divide-and-conquer strategy prevailed in Chicago by pitting construction workers against employees who will stock shelves and ring registers.

The biggest U.S. retailer reached a deal with the building trades union two weeks before the city council unanimously approved Chicago’s second store. Those workers will erect all Wal-Mart facilities in northern Illinois during the next three years, according to a labor agreement signed by Patrick Hamilton, Wal-Mart’s vice president of construction.

The non-union employees who will staff the stores in the nation’s third-largest city have no such agreement.

“Wal-Mart played on the whims of the building trade unions, and the rest gave in,” the Rev. Booker Vance, a spokesman for Good Jobs Chicago, said in a telephone interview. Good Jobs Chicago is a coalition of local unions, congregations and community groups.

“You have a lot of smoke and mirrors, and Wal-Mart would like to give the impression that they acted in good faith, but they have not,” Vance said.

Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of “The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business,” agreed with Vance.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and the Chicago Federation of Labor, an umbrella organization representing 300 unions in the area, were “sold out by the building trades, who are still pretty powerful in the city,” Lichtenstein said in a telephone interview.

“The UFCW lost this battle,” Lichtenstein said.

Although Wal-Mart signed a construction-worker agreement, obtained by Bloomberg News, it wouldn’t commit to pay hourly workers in Chicago a specific wage.

“There are no deals,” said Steve Restivo, a spokesman for the Bentonville, Ark., company. Wal-Mart didn’t play one set of unions against another, and the labor agreement isn’t a departure from how the retailer is building other stores in Illinois with union workers, he said.

Tom Villanova, president of the Chicago & Cook County Building & Construction Trades Council, said his group worked closely with other unions. The council represents plumbers, electricians, painters and other building-related workers.

“We never bullied anybody,” Villanova said in a telephone interview. “We were always in lockstep with UFCW and CFL with everything they were trying to do.”

Wal-Mart envisions adding several dozen stores and creating 10,000 hourly positions and 2,000 construction jobs across Chicago, where unemployment was 10.2 percent in June, compared with the 9.5 percent national average. Unemployment in Illinois was 10.4 percent.

The supercenter approved for the Pullman neighborhood would create 300 in-store positions, according to Restivo, and about 250 union construction jobs, according to Villanova, who said Wal-Mart committed to building 55 stores throughout northern Illinois during the next three years.

Making those plans a reality hinged on Wal-Mart wooing local politicians and labor unions. The Chicago City Council’s June 30 vote approving Wal-Mart’s second store in the city was 50-0.

“I was a little surprised it was unanimous,” David Doig, the site developer, said in an interview.