[hmkpoker]

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The way walmart abuses their employees is one of the main reasons people are against them. Walmart pays slave wages and makes their workers work off the clock, and is very well known to constantly threaten and abuse their workers. Compare this to Costco where an ordinary cashier or stocker makes $40,000 after just a few years.

Also just last month Walmart announced that they are freezing the wages of their long term employees. The workers who have been there 10 or 15 years and worked themselves up to a measley $12 an hour or so were told they would no longer get any raises, not even a measley cost of living raise. So they will be making the same wage 10 years from now!! So with inflation they are losing money every year.

I don't see how anyone with a conscience can support such an evil company. And besides that the stuff they sell is crap, the customer service is non existant and laughable - after all what kind of loser do you have to be to want to work at walmart? Wendy's pays more than walmart, and frying burgers is a more respectable job than working at walmart.

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Along similar lines, but to an even greater degree, large manufacturers are known to export their labor to truly impoverished countries and have them work in squalid sweatshops for compensation that is far less than WalMart. Many people are quick to call this "exploitation," since the people of these poverty-stricken countries are only choosing to work in these sweatshops because they have no other options, and the practice of exporting labor is demonized.

However, surely you can see the problem with forbidding labor export: if the big corporations are not allowed to export their labor, the people who worked at the sweatshops only because they lived in such squalid conditions still live in squalid conditions. Usually the lack of world government (which would create other, almost assuredly worse problems if it existed) simply means that the corporation will find another impoverished country, and once again people living in terrible conditions will choose something slightly better (even if it is still, by our standards, barbaric).

I agree that working at WalMart is a terrible job, and I doubt that any WalMart employees are proud of their work, yet somehow it employs 1.6 million people. Why would so many people want to work at a place that has such disagreeable working conditions? Like the case of third world countries, this is a reflection of the current economic conditions of the country.

However, we cannot ignore what WalMart does for us. It gives us goods at very cheap prices, and apparently a lot of people want these goods. Cheap goods are very important. If you're a leftist, that may sound greedy and materialistic, but if the size of the wage on recieves is of any importance, so too is the cost of the things he can buy with those wages. Forcing WalMart to adhere to raised price floors can and will have an effect on the prices...and if the prices go up, that could (and almost certainly will) damage the economy from a different direction.