I figured something was up with Andrew Young, the former United Nations ambassador and mayor of Atlanta, when he came to Chicago a few weeks ago to fight the City Council's plan to require big box stores like Wal-Mart to pay workers a minimum of $10 an hour by the year 2010. obs, the council members didn't think the city should subsidize them as so often happens elsewhere because of inadequate health insurance and other benefits. (Mayor Richard Daley, however, is expected to veto the ordinance any day now.)

So how come a guy with Young's credentials is on the other side?

I have to admit I missed the announcement, but sometime last year Andrew Young became the chairman of an organization called Working Families for Wal-Mart. The group was created and financed by the Arkansas-based giant when it decided to take a more proactive role in trumpeting its own story, taking on its long list of detractors. And what better figurehead than a man with Andrew Young's credentials?

Well, the one-time civil rights icon has now stepped down from his new role. He went just a tad overboard for the world's largest retailer when in an interview with a Los Angeles newspaper he declared that ethnic moms and pops have been ripping off poor folks for generations.

"You see those are the people who have been overcharging us," he said of the small store owners, "and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off

Andy Young is a genuine civil rights hero, going all the way back to the founding of the movement in the late '50s and early '60s. He was a favorite of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and was with him the day he was assassinated in Memphis. He became a champion of working people during his two terms in Congress from Georgia and then as mayor of Atlanta.

So it was strange, it seemed to me, that Young, now 74, would turn up proclaiming it would be unfair for a city to require Wal-Mart to pay $10 an hour wages and at least $3 an hour in benefits like health care at the stores it plans to build in some of Chicago's low-income neighborhoods.

Young declared that such a city ordinance would chase Wal-Mart out of town and, hence, jobs would be lost for some of those low-income folks in those neighborhoods.

A large majority of the council wound up disagreeing, thinking that a $10 an hour salary some four years from now was the least to expect from a corporate giant. Besides, while the city wants the j our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs."

A Wal-Mart store in the 'hood, apparently, would solve the problem with those greedy little guys.

The interview, naturally, caused a huge outcry. An embarrassed Young quickly quit the Wal-Mart gig and, to his credit, issued an apology.

"It's against everything I ever thought in my life," he said. "It never should have been said."

That's what happens when good people sell their souls.

Copyright ©2006, Capital Newspapers

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