Not really; the bosses aren’t going to be afraid of this at all. Luigi scared them, this doesn’t.
How about dozens of smaller bombs left in random public locations to protest how you were treated by an employer?
George Metesky pre-dated social media, but he did write lots of letters.
Compare his body count to that of the previously mentioned Dupont Plaza Hotel Fire. 0 deaths and 15 injuries, to 96-98 dead and 140 injured.
My point wasn’t that bombings are nice; it’s that arson is potentially far more dangerous. Arson can easily level whole towns, no amateur bomber can make a bomb that does that. You need to escalate to nuclear weapons to do that.
And, what makes it in some ways even worse, it’s unpredictable. The same arson attack that can level a whole town can also completely fail to do any significant damage at all to your intended target.
Yes; it’s one reason I consider the comparison to Luigi unfair. Whatever else people say about him, Luigi wasn’t going to be accidentally leveling any towns with a pistol.
I agree that this wasn’t targeted as specifically as Luigi did, and isn’t ideal, but since it already happened, the best we can hope for, then, is that employers took the message. I doubt they will though.
Has anyone seen any references to how much this guy was actually getting paid? In my area, manufacturing jobs actually pay pretty well, so I’m really curious to see what Kimberly Clark offers.
He wasn’t a Kimberly Clark employee; he worked for NFI Industries, who operated the warehouse. According to Indeed salary data, the average NFI warehouse worker wage is around $18/hr. Average one-bedroom apartment rent in Ontario is $2000/month.
Someone making $18/hr probably isn’t living in the $2000/month apartment, but you can still see how the salary vs expense equation doesn’t work out.
Okay, thanks for the clarification. That $18 pay isn’t impressive, but it’s not justification to put so many people in harm’s way, not to mention costing everyone else their job.
One theory I’ve seen states that Labor Unions help mitigate this kind of thing, and thus are useful not only to the workers (who get their bargaining position improved) but to the employer (who is not killed and buried in the ruins of his factory/warehouse)
Back in the 1990s, I wrote for a zine (remember those?) and the editor told the story several times of the person she knew who “screwed the fascists at City Hall” by pouring paint into a fountain on the property. She said, “No, the person you screwed was a maintenance worker who probably earned minimum wage while he cleaned up your mess with toxic solvents, and your ‘message’ was totally lost on him.”
I am not condoning what this guy did. But in addition to the low pay he may
not have been allowed to work full time. In California if you work 30+ hours
per week your employer has to give you medical insurance. Some companies
will limit your hours so that not only do you not have medical insurance but
you also are also struggling to get by on 30 hours or less pay per week.
The loopholes abound, don’t they? I did hear that he was a contracted employee of a temp agency.
Sprinklers are designed to handle one fire, not 30+. The sprinkler system in a typical large warehouse is designed to flow a maximum of 12 sprinklers at the same time, in a 3x4 configuration. Each sprinkler will flow about 175 gpm, for a total of about 2300 gallons per minute if all 12 open (there’s an imbalance and some will flow more than that). That’s at the hydraulically most remote point in the system - get closer to the water supply and the flow will increase.
The flow per sprinkler is based on what the overall system is designed to protect. Assuming it was designed correctly, tissue is classified as a Group A plastic - it isn’t actually plastic but it burns like it is. Floor piles of tissue makes a very, very high challenge fire. The sprinklers would have been designed to handle that kind of fire. But only one of them.
Now combine a high challenge fire with multiple, simultaneous fires. The first fire is likely going to be controlled (or actually suppressed) by the sprinklers. Once the second fire happens, sprinklers over that fire open, dropping the available pressure for the first sprinklers that opened, and their flow rate drops. Now there isn’t enough water for either fire. Add in a third, fourth, fifth, etc fire and it’s a losing game.
The density of water that the sprinklers are trying to hit, in this case, is over a gallon per minute per square foot. No one would ever want to pay for a sprinkler system that can provide over a million gallons per minute to protect the entire building simultaneously. Fires don’t burn like that - unless they’re intentionally set, and then it’s a guaranteed loser.
I disagree. I think we can all agree that people who rob other people at knifepoint are wrong. So we should be encouraging them to do something stupid that would lead to their arrest.
The message should be “If you’re going to commit a violent felony, always remember to record the crime and post it online. That way you’re legally protected by copyright and the police can’t arrest you. It’s part of your rights as a sovereign citizen.”
where does this end?
“all you had to do is make daddy not angry and you’d have been ok - and mammy too … See what you did me do?” ???
If you really wanna change the world, form a union … does anybody really believe this will address any underlying issues?
Not just once, and frankly it would definitely be better to kill CEO’s and billionaires, but i’ll take what I can get. It ends when there are no billionaires left. Apparently there’s been a rash of warehouse fires since this happened, not sure if its the normal amount but nobody is reporting a connection.
Join or form unions. Dead fatcats pass their money to their heirs. Fatcats whose companies have unions share the wealth with their workers.
True, they’re only sharing at knifepoint, but share they do.
@LSLGuy
Retired Union Leader & 2nd Generation Union Worker.
Easy peasy. The history of union organization has always been violence free, right? Just form a union and everything is peaceful.
Of course not. Management is quite willing to terrorize workers.
But burning down occasional warehouses doesn’t terrorize fully insured managements.