[bko]

The whole point of a voluntary exchange of labor or goods is that it has to benefit both parties for it to take place.

Companies, including Walmart, don't set wages arbitrarily. Despite their size, they can't control the market for labor. They don't pay what they do because they are generous. There are frictions with hiring and onboarding people. They want their employees to be happy. And even if they were a significantly large employer, the market is not a closed system and things change

Regarding your welfare claim, it depends how you look at it. Walmart is offering these people the best employment opportunity they can get, otherwise they would work elsewhere. If they lost that opportunity which certainly some would with increased costs, they would likely be moved to more generous government benefits.

[jacobolus]

There is a long history of people deliberately selling themselves into slavery. Just because there is consent involved doesn’t mean it should be legal; there are many types of desperate / coercive situations under which people will make choices that compromise their own bodily autonomy or sacrifice their values.

> [Walmart] wants their employees to be happy

There is little evidence for this that I have seen. Rather, they want to provide as little support for employees possible consistent with maintaining their profits. But there are many, many horrific stories of Walmart abusing and taking unethical (often illegal) advantage of employees.

In addition Walmart spends considerable effort and money lobbying governments to undermine basic worker rights and protections.

[AnthonyMouse]

> There is a long history of people deliberately selling themselves into slavery.

"Selling yourself into slavery" is a contradiction in terms. Willingly exchanging labor for compensation is not slavery. It's just an attempt to frame things in an inflammatory way.

Suppose that someone kidnaps you and forces you to work without compensation for the rest of your life. Suppose that you willingly agree to sign onto $250K in student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy and which you will never in your whole life be able to pay all back. Is agreeing to work for someone your whole life if they put you through college more like the first one or more like the second one? Clearly the second, I think, but then we see people calling it "selling yourself into slavery" on one hand and the government explicitly subsidizing it on the other.

Agreeing to either of those sets of terms is, of course, problematic. But the problem isn't caused by someone being willing to offer those terms, it's caused by people being desperate enough to accept them. And you can't solve that by limiting their alternatives to whatever even worse option that caused them to choose the objectionable one to begin with. You have to add better alternatives, not remove existing ones.

> In addition Walmart spends considerable effort and money lobbying governments to undermine basic worker rights and protections.

You say "undermine basic worker rights and protections" while they say creating jobs for unskilled workers who would otherwise have to rely fully on government assistance.

[jacobolus]

In practice what happens is the availability of exploitable labor creates incentive for abusive employers (and others in power in the society) to maintain poor conditions among their potential labor pool.

In many (both historical and ongoing) cases the societal abuses this goes with are quite horrific, and the large-scale power imbalances are extreme.

Removing abusive employment relations at a society-wide scale is a strong first step towards helping people out of the kind of desperate situations where such arrangements would seem better than alternatives.

The abstract libertarian fantasy-land where every “consensual” “contract” is mutually beneficial sounds nice if you don’t bother learning the details of specific past and present legal and social systems. In reality these abusive social relations are a nightmare, doing irreparable damage to countless people’s lives.

[bko]

> There is a long history of people deliberately selling themselves into slavery.

Then think about how bad their alternatives must be

I will say this about Walmart, despite what you say about conditions and low pay, they are still above the board compared to smaller employers. They follow all the labor laws, pay taxes and afford their employees all the rights required by law. The alternatives such as small employers often don't pay taxes and pay their employees under the table, stripping them of legitimacy and rights. So again it depends on what you're comparing them to