This has to be one of the most annoying bullshit arguments I constantly hear repeated by the Left.

Wal-Mart pays people what their labor is worth. It's called supply and demand. If you have very few marketable skills, guess what? The supply for your few skills is extremely high and the demand is low. Therefore price is low. Why do you expect Wal-Mart to pay entry-level employees more than what their labor is worth? Is it Wal-Mart's fault these people have little marketable skills and can't find better paying employment? If Wal-Mart went out of business tomorrow, do you think there would be more or fewer people drawing government assistance? The fact is Wal-Mart hires the otherwise unhirable. If these people didn't have jobs at Wal-Mart, they wouldn't have jobs. If they could get paid higher salaries elsewhere, they wouldn't stay at Wal-Mart, or at least Wal-Mart would be forced to match that salary if they wanted to keep that employee. What you want is for Wal-Mart to be a charity instead of a business and simply give people money they didn't earn out of some misguided sense of philanthropy. Wal-Mart is not a charity, and they're not obligated to pay people more than what their work is worth.

As for "slave wages." Who abducted these people from their homes an forced them to work at Wal-Mart? You don't become a Wal-Mart employee unless you go to a Wal-Mart, sit at that kiosk, fill out an application, agree to meet with a hiring manager, to to an interview or two and agree to work a certain job for a certain salary. Every part of the job application process is voluntary, whereas slavery is not. If you don't like what they offer to pay you, don't accept the job. If you don't like the working conditions, salary or whatever, you are free to quit and seek employment elsewhere. The fact that you think working at Wal-Mart or any entry-level position is equivalent to slavery really shows how much you don't understand or appreciate how evil slavery was. It demeans all those who have had to endure slavery to compare their plight to those working at an "evil" corporate chain like Wal-Mart.