California:
Warehouse Fire

April 20, 2026

A video posted online shows a man’s hand deliberately igniting a fire in a warehouse. In the background, a narrator states several times, “All you had to do was pay us enough to live,” and also adds in a text, “Pay us more of the value WE bring. Not corporate. Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift.”

A massive fire, which started on April 7 at 12:30 a.m., completely destroyed Kimberly-Clark’s 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse, causing an estimated $500 million in damage, according to the Department of Justice. This warehouse is located east of Los Angeles, in Ontario, California. When this fire started, 20 workers were in the facility, but they left the building without any injuries.

The arsonist of this fire acted alone, and endangered the lives of other workers. The fire destroyed their workplace, very likely causing workers to lose their jobs.

Later, Chamel Abdulkarim, 29, of Highland, California, was arrested and charged with arson for setting up this fire. Abdulkarim was a worker of NFI Industries, a subcontractor that operated this facility for Kimberly-Clark.

NFI warehouse workers earn approximately $18 an hour, or about $37,440 a year before taxes, assuming 40 hours a week and 52 weeks a year. Kimberly-Clark’s own warehouse workers fare only marginally better, earning approximately $23 to $24 an hour—about $50,000 per year.

But the living wage in Ontario, California, is $28.26 an hour or $59,000 per year, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Living Wage Calculator website. This wage is $10 higher than NFI workers’ wages, like Abdulkarim’s, and $4.00 higher than Kimberly-Clark’s workers’ wages.

So, the subcontractor NFI and even Kimberly-Clark don’t pay their workers enough to live.

But Kimberly-Clark exploited these workers who cannot afford to live to extract an annual net profit of about two billion dollars in fiscal year 2025. They are responsible for workers’ angry impulses to strike back.