Walmart is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores and grocery stores. Walmart was more profitable than rivals Kmart and Sears by the late 1980s. By 1990, it became the largest U.S. retailer by revenue. In 2005, Walmart reported US$312.4 billion in sales, more than 6,200 facilities around the world – including 3,800 stores in the United States and 2,800 elsewhere, employing more than 1.6 million associates. Walmart U.S. does business in six strategic merchandise units, such as grocery, health and wellness, entertainment, hardlines, apparel, and home across various store formats, including supercenters, discount stores, neighbourhood markets and other small store formats, as well as walmart.com. Grocery consists of a line of grocery items, including meat, produce, natural and organics, deli and bakery, dairy, frozen foods, alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages, floral and dry grocery, as well as consumables, such as health and beauty aids, baby products, household chemicals, paper goods and pet supplies. Health and wellness includes pharmacy, optical services, clinical services, over-the-counter drugs and other medical products. Entertainment contains electronics, toys, cameras and supplies, photo processing services, cellular phones, cellular service plan contracts and prepaid service, movies, music, video games and books. Hardlines consist of stationery, automotive, hardware and paint, sporting goods, fabrics and crafts and seasonal merchandise. Apparel includes apparel for women, girls, men, boys and infants, as well as shoes, jewelry and accessories. Home includes home furnishings, housewares and small appliances, bedding, home decor, outdoor living and horticulture.
As well put together as the store looks, Walmart is not what it seems to be. With over 2.2 million employees worldwide, Walmart has faced a torrent of lawsuits and issues with regards to its workforce. These issues involve low wages, poor working conditions, inadequate health care, as well as issues involving the company's strong anti-union policies.
In fact, here are 9 things that Wal-mart doesn't want you to know.
1. Wal-Mart regularly violates federal law and flouts international human rights standards.
The right of workers to organize labor unions is protected by the National Labor Relations Act and is also cited as a basic human right by the International Labor Organization. In 2002, 43 distinct charges were filed against Wal-Mart for violations of the National Labor Relations Act and since 1995, 60 complaints have been filed against Wal-Mart with the National Labor Relations Board. These complaints and charges range from illegal firings to threats and intimidations against workers who attempt to exercise their right to organize.

2. Wal-Mart regularly falls below industry standards for employee pay.
In 2001, the average pay of a Wal-Mart worker was $8.23 per hour, more than two dollars less per hour than the average supermarket employee wage of $10.35 per hour. Furthermore, Wal-Mart associates only average 32 hours a week, causing many employees to be classified as “part-time,” thus restricting their access to health care and other benefits exclusively earmarked for full-timers. In fact, Wal-Mart wages are so low that the average Wal-Mart worker’s annual salary in 2001 was almost $1,000 below the federal poverty line of $14,630 for a family of three.

3. Wal-Mart sometimes doesn’t even pay its low wages at all.
Poverty level wages are bad enough. But Wal-Mart apparently feels that not paying wages at all is even better for its bottom line. As of December 2002, 39 class action lawsuits in 30 states were filed against Wal-Mart claiming tens of millions of dollars in back pay owed to hundreds of thousands employees. These lawsuits included instances of Wal-Mart forcing employees to work through breaks, forcing employees to work off the clock, and even deleting hours from employees’ time sheets without their knowledge.

4. Wal-Mart routinely makes health care unavailable or unaffordable for its employees.
Wal-Mart’s company health insurance is too expensive or practically impossible to get for many of its employees. Just over 40 percent of Wal-Mart employees have insurance through the company plan, far fewer than the 66 percent that is typical of a firm the size of Wal-Mart.

5. Wal-Mart regularly drains public coffers at all levels of government.
The government subsidization of health care for Wal-Mart employees is just the tip of the iceberg. Wal-Mart routinely uses taxpayer money to finance its never-ending corporate growth. A report commissioned by the House Committee on Education and Welfare estimates that a two hundred person Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers approximately $420,750 a year, or $2,103 per employee. 
These costs include:
-$36,000 a year for free and reduced cost school lunches,
-$42,000 for Section 8 housing assistance,
-$125,000 for low-income family tax credits and deductions,
-$100,000 for additional Title I expenses,
-$108,000 for state children’s health insurance expenses, and
-$9,750 for low income energy assistance

6. Wal-Mart makes a habit of flouting immigration laws and regulations.
As Wal-Mart continues its race to the bottom in worker compensation, Wal-Mart routinely seeks out the most vulnerable and powerless workers in the American economy: undocumented immigrant workers. On October 23, 2003, federal agents raided 61 stores in 21 states leading to the arrest of 250 janitors who were undocumented workers. Similar raids in 1998 and 2001 led to the arrest of an additional 102 undocumented Wal-Mart employees.

7. Wal-Mart has played a major role in the outsourcing of American jobs overseas.
Although Wal-Mart has always tried to pass itself off as a company deeply concerned with the well-being of everyday American workers, actions speak louder than words. No longer content to follow its old motto of “Buy American,” Wal-Mart now imports over 50 percent of its merchandise from overseas. In 2003 alone, Wal-Mart purchased one-eighth of all Chinese imports to the United States. And by insisting on the low prices that only sweatshop labor can provide, Wal-Mart has used its tremendous power in the marketplace to bully American firms into moving their production facilities overseas.

8. Wal-Mart has consistently discriminated against disabled workers.
Wal-Mart has also been an equal opportunity discriminator by choosing to ignore federal laws banning discrimination against the disabled. Wal-Mart has been the defendant in a number of suits alleging this kind of discrimination and in 2001 alone it was required to pay $6 million to settle 13 such lawsuits. These lawsuits were brought not by individuals, but by the federal government through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. These settlements also required that Wal-Mart change its hiring practices and provide more training for employees in anti-discrimination laws

9. Wal-Mart routinely puts its employees at risk of serious injury or death.
Wal-Mart has also chosen to flout federal worker safety regulations on a regular basis. This is most apparent in its policy to “lock-in” employees overnight. Wal-Mart claims this is to prevent employee theft and unauthorized breaks. In order to enforce these rules, Wal-Mart threatens to fire any workers who use the fire exits and only provides a key to unlock the doors to a manager.

Not only does Wal-mart have multiple of lawsuits put on them within their workforce, but outside of them as well.

According to a National Labor Committee 2006 report, an estimated 200 children, some 11 years old or even younger, are sewing clothing for Wal-Mart. The children report being routinely slapped and beaten, sometimes falling down from exhaustion, forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, even some all-night, 19-to-20-hour shifts, often seven days a week, for wages as low as 6 ½ cents an hour. The wages are so wretchedly low that many of the child workers get up at 5:00 a.m. each morning to brush their teeth using just their finger and ashes from the fire, since they cannot afford a toothbrush or toothpaste.The workers say that if they could earn just 36 cents an hour, they could climb out of misery and into poverty, where they could live with a modicum of decency.
 In the month of September, the children had just one day off, and before clothing shipments had to leave for the U.S. the workers were often kept at the factory 95 to 110 hours a week. After being forced to work a grueling all-night 19-to-20-hour shift, from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. the following day, the children sleep on the factory floor for two or three hours before being woken to start their next shift at 8:00 a.m. that same morning. The child workers are beaten for falling behind in their production goal, making mistakes or taking too long in the bathroom (which is filthy, lacking even toilet paper, soap or towels). In 1996, after Charles Kernaghan and the National Labor Committee revealed that Kathie Lee Gifford’s clothing line for Wal-Mart was being made by 12 and 13-year-olds in Honduras, the resulting scandal and publicity was enough to virtually wipe out child labor in garment factories around the world producing for export to the U.S. "Exactly a decade after the Kathie Lee Gifford scandal, children are again sewing clothing for Wal-Mart, Hanes and other U.S. companies,” said Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee. “Children belong in school, not locked in sweatshops. Wal-Mart, Hanes and the other companies owe these children, and must now provide them with stipends to replace their wages and cover all necessary expenses to send them back to school.” Not only did the U.S. companies fail to notice the child workers, the beatings, the excessive mandatory overtime, but also that not one single worker in Harvest Rich was paid the correct overtime pay legally due them. Any worker daring to ask for their proper wages, or that their most basic legal rights be respected, would immediately be attacked, beaten and fired. “Right now, more than 100 children at the Harvest Rich factory are being threatened with firing,” says Kernaghan, “It is time for the U.S. companies to act immediately, today, to guarantee that this does not happen and that the children are returned to school.” The Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights is an independent, non-profit human rights organization and the leading anti-sweatshop watchdog group in the U.S. The Institute has run successful campaigns not only against Kathie Lee Gifford and Wal-Mart but also on production for Sean “P Diddy” Combs, the NFL, NBA, GAP, Disney, Nike and others. The retail giant faces charges of bribery and corruption in Mexico, lawsuits from contract warehouse workers in the U.S. alleging wage theft and a coordinated walkout in the U.S. on the busiest shopping day of the year. What was most damaging of all is the increasing scrutiny over Walmart's ties to a garment factory in Bangladesh where 112 workers were trapped and killed in a fire in late November 2012. The company, which buys $1 billion in garments from Bangladesh each year, initially tried to deny any connection. The fire, which was the worst industrial accident to date in the South Asian country, has also drawn international attention to lack of oversight over unsafe working conditions in a country that is rapidly climbing up the ladder of the global supply chain of contractors and sub-contractors that produce goods for multinational retailers. Indeed, since 2006 over 300 people have died in similar factory fires in Bangladesh. “Managers told us, 'Nothing happened. The fire alarm had just gone out of order. Go back to work,'" said Mohammad Ripu, a worker at the factory told the USA Today newspaper. "We quickly understood that there was a fire. As we again ran for the exit point we found it locked from outside, and it was too late," says Ripu who says that he eventually escaped by jumping out of a second-story window. The main exit of the building was locked, and there were no emergency exits, fire inspectors said. The fire extinguishers that hung on the walls were empty, surviving workers said, merely props used to pass safety inspections. At first, Walmart - along with Disney and Sears - denied that Tazreen produced merchandise for their companies at the time of the fire. In conclusion, the law suits, as well as the stories on these sweatshops should say no more on why Wal-mart is a terrible corporation. Also, we should try working towards shutting down sweatshops or turning them into a better and safer working environment with better wage, health care, and reasonable working hours. Also because, children belong in school, not locked in sweatshops.