“If you’re not going to pay us enough to fucking live, you can at least pay us enough to not do this shit,” the man says as he reaches out with a lighter and ignites a pallet of toilet paper. Minutes later, multiple pallets can be seen burning in a video taken inside the 1.2-million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark warehouse located in California’s Inland Empire. “There goes your inventory,” the man says.
The warehouse quickly became a raging inferno, requiring 175 firefighters and fifteen truck companies to subdue the six-alarm fire over the next fifteen hours. Warehouse workers were safely evacuated, and no one was injured by the blaze.
Police quickly arrested twenty-nine year old Chamel Abdulkarim, who they say posted several self-incriminating videos of himself lighting the fire on social media. If convicted, Abdulkarim could face up to twenty years in federal prison. He has pleaded not guilty.
I’ve spent my life trying to organize workers in smart and strategic ways to build power. Burning down a warehouse is not on my list of effective working-class tactics — quite the contrary. But I doubt that this is the last time we will hear a story of one low-wage worker’s incendiary revenge, and this story in particular goes much deeper. To understand it, we need to start with Kimberly-Clark’s financial disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Kimberly-Clark, manufacturer of popular household products such as Kleenex, Huggies, and Scott toilet paper and paper towels, has been on the Fortune 500 every year since it was first established in 1955. It is a global company with tens of thousands of employees. And it is incredibly profitable.
I reviewed Kimberly-Clark’s 10-K disclosures, annual reports on the company’s finances and operations that the SEC requires publicly traded companies to submit annually, from 2015 through 2025. Over that time, the company collectively…
Auteur: Chris Brooks
