In the United States Wal-Mart forces employees to work very long hours with minimal pay. According to Wal-Mart Watch, on average Wal-Mart employees make $8.81, with an average annual salary of only $15,500, which means most of the full-time employees live below the poverty line. Wal-Mart has also settled over 70 state and federal cases from June 2005 to June 2011 surrounding wage and hour violations including lack of breaks allowed and failure to pay overtime. Wal-Mart has recently stopped providing heath insurance to part-time employees, and in January 2012 workers complained of dangerous of dangerous conditions including abnormal heat, unfair speed quotas, broken equipment posing hazards, and excessive dust and chemicals causing dizziness and nosebleeds.

Wal-Mart also treats minority employees unfairly. It employs undocumented immigrants to clean stores, forcing them to work seven days a week without overtime pay and it often locks them in stores overnight when they worked late hours. Latino workers at Sam's Club in California recently filed a lawsuit claiming they endured harassment and racial slurs from other employees.

Lastly, Wal-Mart provides substandard working conditions at the overseas factories. Wal-Mart continually demands lower prices from its suppliers who then make more outrageous and abusive demands on their workers in order to meet Wal-Mart’s requirements. According to the International Labor Rights Fund, Wal-Mart supplier sweatshop workers in China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nicaragua and Swaziland are denied minimum wages, forced to work overtime without getting paid, and refused legally mandated health care. In other foreign factories that produce Wal-Mart products there have been worker's rights violations that consist of locked bathrooms, starvation wages, pregnancy tests, denial of access to health care, and workers being fired and blacklisted if they try to defend their rights.