Low Wage Wal-Mart

Every day, across the world, millions and millions of people work for extremely low wages. For these people, every day is a challenge. Work is often very hard and long, and money is often quite scarce. I, myself, have never worked for low wages, therefore I have not experienced the struggles these people endure. However, my life is greatly influenced by low wage workers every day. Whether it be a store worker selling me clothes, or a teenager making them half a world away, my life is affected by these workers.

Many times when buying new shoes or clothing we do not see the many people behind the scenes, so to speak, that make these things possible. Most people just completely overlook the fact that their clothing has passed through several hands to get to where it is. Many of these hands happen to be low wage workers, earning just above or below minimum wage. Often times, many of these workers are working overseas in factories and sweatshops that do not pay even close to minimum wage.

Many people in America do not care to check the labels of their clothing to see where it was made. If they were to check, they would discover that almost all of their clothing was made in another country overseas. This allows the clothing industry in the United States takes advantage of low wage workers constantly. They do this in order to produce large amounts of their product for very little cost to them. The clothing industry is responsible for low wage workers in sweatshops all over the globe. In many countries around the world there are no minimum wage laws and the clothing industry uses this to their advantage. The factories run in other countries by the U.S. clothing industry pay their workers next to nothing for all day, back breaking labor. The workers are also treated as machines and not as people. Bosses and managers are constantly looking over their shoulders, monitoring everything they do, telling workers to hurry up and work faster and harder than they possibly could. On top of all this they are being paid next to nothing for their hard work. These injustices occur constantly in factories all over the globe.

Wal-Mart has always been known for it’s incredibly low prices and great deals. However, many people do not know Wal-Mart beyond that. For my low wage hypertext project I would like to explore the relationships between the Wal-Mart clothing industry in the United States, Wal-Mart’s worldwide sweatshops, and consumers all over the globe. Not only do I wish to explore the low wage workers taken advantage of overseas, but also those taken advantage of in the U.S. I would also like to compare the wages paid to workers overseas to the prices paid for the products made by these workers. I would also like to show how workers are taken advantage of not only overseas but in the United States as well.