一把火烧掉五亿：当工人说"受够了"

Speaking of one of the most shocking news stories in America recently, it's an arson case in California.

A warehouse worker who felt his wages were too low.

Burned down a 1.2 million square foot warehouse.

The stuff inside was worth 500 million dollars.

And he recorded video while burning it and posted it to Instagram.

This caused a huge reaction in America.

Let's go into detail about what exactly happened.

The suspect is named Chamel Abdulkarim.

Twenty-nine years old.

Lives in Highland, California.

He worked at a Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Ontario.

Ontario is about forty miles east of Los Angeles.

Kimberly-Clark is a big company that makes tissues and toilet paper.

The big packs of toilet paper you buy at the supermarket.

Many of them are made by this company.

How big was this warehouse?

1.2 million square feet.

About the size of a dozen football fields.

Inside it was entirely paper products.

Toilet paper and tissues.

But Chamel didn't work directly for Kimberly-Clark.

He worked through a staffing company called NFI Industries.

This distinction is important.

Because temporary workers usually get lower wages than regular employees.

Fewer benefits too.

And often lack job security.

You're not the company's person.

You can be replaced at any time.

This kind of labor relationship is very common in America's warehouse industry.

Amazon's warehouses use a similar model.

Using large numbers of temp workers to reduce costs.

It happened on a Tuesday at about 12:30 AM.

Chamel used a lighter to ignite the toilet paper on warehouse shelves.

He didn't just light one spot.

He set fires in multiple locations.

Toilet paper is made of paper.

Paper is one of the best fuels.

The fire spread extremely fast.

Then he did something nobody expected.

He filmed the arson.

Then posted it to Instagram.

In the video you can see flames spreading between shelves.

You can hear him say: "All you had to do was pay us enough to live."

In another video he says: "Your inventory is gone."

Later he also sent a text to a coworker.

Writing: "Pay us more of the value we create."

"Don't just pay the company executives."

"Haven't seen a shareholder come in for a single shift."

These words show his motivation was clear.

He was unhappy with his wages.

Unhappy with how the company distributes profits.

The fire burned for a long time.

Firefighters arrived but couldn't control it at all.

Because a 1.2 million square foot space was full of paper.

In the end the entire warehouse roof collapsed.

Several big trucks parked outside the warehouse were also destroyed.

How big was the loss?

The products inside were worth about 500 million dollars.

The building itself was worth about 150 million dollars.

Together that's over 650 million.

But the most important point is: nobody was hurt.

There were about twenty workers in the warehouse at the time.

They all evacuated safely.

This was a fortunate outcome in an unfortunate situation.

Chamel was caught almost immediately.

The reason is simple.

He recorded the video himself and posted it online.

The whole internet saw it.

It wasn't hard at all for police to find him.

After being caught he was denied bail.

The charges he now faces include.

Federal arson, minimum five years maximum twenty.

One count of aggravated arson plus six counts of regular arson in California.

Because the damage exceeded ten million dollars.

In the most serious scenario he faces ten years to life in prison.

There's one detail particularly worth noting.

After being caught Chamel compared himself to Luigi Mangione in a phone call.

This name is now known by almost everyone in America.

Mangione is the person who killed UnitedHealthcare's CEO in New York last year.

UnitedHealthcare is one of America's biggest health insurance companies.

After Mangione killed that CEO.

A strange phenomenon appeared in American society.

Many people didn't condemn him.

Instead they sympathized with him.

Some even treated him as a hero.

Because many Americans hate insurance companies.

They feel insurance companies refuse to pay claims on purpose for profit.

Making many sick people unable to afford seeing a doctor.

So when someone killed the insurance company's boss.

Some people felt "he got revenge for us."

Chamel clearly felt he was playing a similar role.

A person standing up for the working class.

A person fighting back against big corporations.

But these two cases have a fundamental difference.

Mangione killed a person.

Chamel didn't kill anyone.

Nobody was hurt.

But he burned over 600 million dollars worth of stuff.

And the prison time he faces may not be shorter than Mangione's.

This reflects a bigger problem.

The living conditions of bottom-level American workers.

Warehouse work is one of the hardest jobs in America.

Workers move heavy objects for over ten hours a day.

Running around in enormous warehouses.

Many warehouses have no air conditioning in summer.

But what about wages?

About fifteen to twenty dollars an hour.

In a high-cost place like California.

That amount of money really isn't enough to live on.

And at the same time.

The parent companies of these warehouses are making billions in profit.

CEOs are getting tens of millions in annual salary.

This gap makes many people angry.

But anger cannot become crime.

American prosecutors have been very clear.

No matter what your reason is.

Arson is arson.

You can go on strike.

You can organize a union.

You can sue the company in court.

You can vote.

But you cannot start a fire.

A reasonable demand cannot be expressed through crime.

This is the core contradiction of this case.

What he said may have been right.

But what he did was completely wrong.