By Larry Copeland

ATLANTA — Andrew Young, who's never been shy about staking out controversial positions, is at it again.

Young, one of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s top aides, a former United Nations ambassador and former mayor of Atlanta, announced last month that he would head a group formed to spread the word about the positive contributions of Wal-Mart Stores (WMT).

Young says he was drawn to the Wal-Mart venture because the company is creating wealth, especially in rural and inner-city communities shunned by other retailers.

"I got involved with Wal-Mart because I think Wal-Mart is making middle-class lifestyles available to poor people. ... I agreed to chair the (national steering) committee of Working Families for Wal-Mart because there was another side of the story that wasn't being told," he says.

His company, GoodWorks International, is being paid an undisclosed amount to help promote Wal-Mart through interviews, speeches and editorials. One of Young's goals, he says, is to get the retailer into Africa. Working Families was formed last year and is funded primarily by Wal-Mart Stores.

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, faces intense criticism. Its leading critics, including two union-backed groups, have accused the company of skimping on wages and benefits, discriminating against women and hurting small businesses and the environment. In January, Maryland passed legislation requiring Wal-Mart to spend more on employee health care. More than 22 other states are considering similar measures.

Last month, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott announced that the company was improving employee benefits. Last year, Wal-Mart was named one of the 30 Best Companies for Diversity by Black Enterprise magazine; an independent study by Global Insight, a privately held economic analysis company, found that Wal-Mart saved each American household, on average, $2,329 in 2004.

News of Young's deal with Working Families dismayed some of his labor union supporters, who have long regarded him as a staunch ally. It shocked some of his colleagues from the civil rights movement, who had also criticized him in 1997 for a similar deal with Nike, which was then drawing protests for doing business with overseas sweatshops.

"All I'll say is that Andy's had a wonderful career as ambassador, congressman and mayor, and in his old age he's taken some strange turns," says the Rev. Joseph Lowery, 81, a Georgia activist and former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "I haven't had a chance to discuss it with him, but I'm concerned about his partnership with Wal-Mart. Everybody who's talked to me about it has been shocked. They'd sort of gotten over the Nike debacle, and now this."

Allies disappointed

"It's one thing for him to have a contractual relationship with Wal-Mart to help them improve their business practices," says Markel Hutchins, 28, an Atlanta activist who blasted the agreement this month in an opinion-page column in The Atlanta Journal Constitution. "But utilizing his civil rights iconic leadership status to defend the business practices of Wal-Mart is another issue."

Hutchins says he has a contractual relationship with the United Food and Commercial Workers International union, which funds WakeUpWalMart.com.

Chris Kofinis, communications director of WakeUpWalMart.com, which is seeking reform of Wal-Mart business practices, says: "We would hope and expect that Ambassador Young will use his position to pressure CEO Lee Scott and help us change Wal-Mart for the better, rather than somehow defend an abysmal record of cruelly and needlessly exploiting 1.3 million working families, children, immigrants and American taxpayers."

Young, characteristically, brushes off the criticism. "The opponents of Wal-Mart are really opponents of globalization, and I think that battle has been lost," he says. "Globalization is not a political phenomenon but a technical phenomenon. It's not bad for America. But we have to manage it and lead it rather than fight it."

Young has some criticisms of Wal-Mart. It needs more diversity among its suppliers, needs to show more community sensitivity and needs to add security cameras and parking lot patrols at some stores, he says.

Support from Pat Boone

GoodWorks International is an Atlanta-based consulting group that promotes business ventures, especially in Africa and the Caribbean. It has a contract with Working Families for Wal-Mart, whose national steering committee also includes singer Pat Boone, and Ron Galloway, who co-produced the 2005 pro-Wal-Mart documentary, Why Wal-Mart Works and Why That Makes Some People C-R-A-Z-Y.

"You need to look at who's complaining about Wal-Mart," Young says. "If it's not 100 million people shopping there every week and it's not 8,000 people competing for 500 jobs (at a new Atlanta store), who is it? They're complaining because they're wrong and they don't understand that ending poverty means generating wealth and not just fighting to redistribute the existing wealth."

He describes Wal-Mart's business practices this way: "It's hard-nosed capitalism that's very rough around the edges. But that's what it takes to produce a quality lifestyle for poor people."

"And there was another way of looking at Wal-Mart that people were reluctant to see. ... Poverty in America is market potential unrealized. The largest underserved market in the world is not China or India. It's the (American) rural poor and the inner cities. That's approximately a $2 trillion market that nobody pays attention to."