All You Had to Do Was Pay Us Enough to Live

The Kimberly-Clark warehouse fire isn’t just a crime story. It’s an economic injustice story. And corporate America wrote every word of it

“All you had to do was pay us enough to live. All you had to do was pay us enough to live. There goes your inventory.”

Those are the words Chamel Abdul Karim spoke while filming himself allegedly burning down a Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Ontario, California. The fire caused an estimated $500 million in destroyed inventory and hundreds of millions more in rebuild costs. He also allegedly texted: “Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift.”

The Justice Department has charged him. Corporate media has covered it as a crime story. And that’s where most outlets stopped.

I’m not stopping there. Let’s Address This.

Source: ABC7

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You can watch part of the video shared by Chamel here.

The Math That Corporate Media Won’t Do

I want to be clear: I am not endorsing what Chamel Abdul Karim did. Destruction of property is not a policy platform, and I am not treating it as one.

What I am saying is this: his anger is grounded in a documented, quantifiable, economic reality that billion-dollar corporations and their political allies have worked very hard to keep you from seeing clearly. So let’s see it clearly.

Chamel was not even a Kimberly-Clark warehouse employee. He was a contractor earning approximately $18 an hour — roughly $36,000 a year.

Kimberly-Clark’s own warehouse workers fare only marginally better, earning approximately $23 to $24 an hour — about $46,000 to $47,000 a year.

And lest anyone claims these are livable wages, let’s look at what it actually costs to live in Ontario, California. A simple living, not luxuriously, not comfortably, but simply to get by: approximately $67,000 a year for a single person.

Source: Bestplaces.net

That means Kimberly-Clark was paying its own employees $20,000 less per year than the basic cost of living in the city where they worked. It was paying contractors like Chamel $30,000 less per year than what it costs to survive.

And now for the number that should make every American furious.

On just over $20 billion in annual revenue, Kimberly-Clark generates approximately $2.55 billion in net profit every single year. The company employs roughly 38,000 people. If Kimberly-Clark chose to pay every single one of those employees an additional $20,000 per year — bringing them to the basic cost-of-living threshold — it would cost the company approximately $750 million annually.

They would still pocket nearly $2 billion in profit every single year.

The warehouse Chamel allegedly burned cost $750 million in damage.

Read that again: the cost of one act of economic desperation is identical to the annual cost of simply paying 38,000 workers enough to live. Kimberly-Clark chose the latter outcome through years of wage suppression. The math is not complicated. The choice was deliberate.

Source: kimberly-clark.com

This Is Not an Isolated Story

Chamel Abdul Karim is one person. But his circumstances are shared by tens of millions of Americans.

Right now, 60% of Americans are not being paid enough even just to get by. Let alone enough to save or enough to build wealth. Not enough to absorb a single unexpected expense. And when we dare to name this reality, we are told the same tired mythology: Americans are lazy. People just need to work harder. If you give low-income workers more money, they’ll stop being motivated.

This is not economics. It is a weapon — deployed specifically to protect the interests of those at the top of the income ladder while convincing those at the bottom that their suffering is their own fault. Let’s examine who actually stops working when they get more money.

The Trickle-Down Scam, By the Numbers

The Trump administration sold its tax policy on a simple promise: cut taxes on billionaires and corporations, and they will create jobs, raise wages, and the prosperity will trickle down to working people.

Here is what actually happened.

This week alone, Oracle laid off 30,000 employees. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees. Both companies are posting record profits. The billionaires who run these companies are not creating jobs with their tax windfalls. They are eliminating jobs while hoarding wealth at a scale this country has never seen.

And as reported by the Institute on Economic Policy and Taxation:

Four of the corporations whose CEOs flanked President Trump at his January 2025 inauguration ceremony have now disclosed that they collectively received $51 billion in federal tax breaks in 2025, much of that likely from the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that was signed into law by Trump over the summer. The annual financial reports recently released by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla disclose that these corporations collectively reported $315 billion in U.S. profits for 2025, and collectively paid just 4.9 percent of that amount in federal corporate income taxes—with Tesla paying exactly zero. That amounts to a collective tax savings of $51 billion last year for these four giant multinational corporations, versus what they would have paid if they paid the full 21 percent federal corporate income tax rate.

It went to shareholders. It went to stock buybacks. It went to executive compensation. It went to the billionaires flanking a president at his inauguration.

Meanwhile, Chamel Abdul Karim was making $18 an hour and couldn’t afford to live where he worked.

Economic Violence Is Still Violence

There is a concept in human rights law and scholarship called structural violence — the idea that social arrangements and institutions can harm people just as surely as physical force, by systematically denying them what they need to survive and thrive. Poverty is not an accident. Wage suppression is not a market outcome. They are choices — made by specific people, in specific boardrooms, with specific political protection — that have specific, measurable human consequences.

When a corporation makes $2.55 billion in annual profit while paying workers $30,000 below the cost of living, that is not an accident or random circumstance. That is economic violence being imposed on working people while the perpetrators collect billion-dollar bonuses and lobby for further tax cuts.

We have criminalized Chamel Abdul Karim’s response to that violence. We have not criminalized the violence itself.

I am not arguing for equivalence. I am arguing for honesty. And honestly, a society that demands compliance from its most economically brutalized members while offering them nothing in return — not a living wage, not healthcare, not dignity, not a basic acknowledgment that their labor has value — should not be surprised when that compliance eventually breaks.

What We Must Demand

The solutions here are not complicated. Chamel already gave the answer—all you had to do was pay us enough to live. This is common sense, but politically inconvenient for those infected with the sickness of hoarding wealth at the expense of human rights.

We must demand a living wage — not a minimum wage calculated decades ago and eroded by inflation, but a wage indexed to the actual cost of living in the places where people work. If Kimberly-Clark can afford $750 million in warehouse losses, it can afford to pay its workers $67,000 a year. As FDR declared when he signed a minimum wage into law in 1933:

It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.

By this standard, Kimberly-Clark had no right to continue to do business in this country. The problem is too many of our elected officials are feckless, lack the basic courage to stop this economic violence, and lack the will to hold exploitative corporations like Kimberly-Clark accountable.

We must demand that billion-dollar corporations pay their actual tax rate—not the 4.9% their lobbyists have engineered. But a rate that reflects the public infrastructure, educated workforce, legal system, and stable society from which they extract their profits. We must demand an end to the trickle-down mythology — a decades-long scam that has transferred at least $79 Trillion from working people to the ultra-wealthy while delivering nothing but record inequality, wage stagnation, and the slow erosion of the American middle class.

And we must be willing to say clearly: the accumulation of obscene, generational, dynastic billionaire wealth while workers cannot afford to live is not a feature of a just society. It is a moral catastrophe.

Abolish billionaire tax shelters. Tax corporations at rates that reflect their actual profits. Pay workers enough to live where they work. These are not radical demands. They are the bare minimum requirements of a society that takes human dignity seriously.

The Real Crime in This Story

The real crime story I’ve described here is one you won’t hear from corporate media. Because their goal is to extract profit, not hold power accountable. This is why your support of our platform at Let’s Address This is even more critical—you help us hold the powerful accountable and elevate stories that corporate media ignores. The harsh truth is that Chamel Abdul Karim will likely go to prison. But the executives who spent years paying workers $30,000 below the cost of living, forcing millions of people to suffer in poverty, while themselves pocketing billions—will face no consequences whatsoever. They will, in fact, continue receiving federal tax breaks funded by those same underpaid workers.

That is the real crime in this story.

And until we have the courage to name it, prosecute it, and dismantle the systems that perpetuate it, we will keep producing the conditions that produce Chamel Abdul Karims — and then act surprised when those conditions explode.

When all they had to do was pay them enough to live.

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a platform dedicated to human rights, economic justice, and the accountability that corporate media refuses to provide. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.