Warehouse Worker Resource Center

Improving working conditions in the warehouse industry in Southern California

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One Year Later: Stronger than Yesterday (Más Fuerte Que Ayer)

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Sheheryar Kaoosji

We are coming up on one year since warehouse workers at Ambiance Apparel in downtown Los Angeles were targeted in a federal raid. On June 6, 2025 families waited outside searching for answers while warehouse workers were detained simply for going to work. Fear spread quickly through working class communities across Los Angeles and the Inland Empire because people knew the attacks would not be isolated incidents. June 6 was an attack meant to silence and intimidate the people whose labor keeps entire industries alive.

But workers and families refused to disappear. In crisis we responded rapidly by raising money for legal defense, collecting essentials, buying out street vendors and setting up incredible rapid response networks across our vast region. Through the Los Angeles Worker Center Network (LAWCN), a coalition of eight worker organizations including the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, partners brought a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security challenging ICE’s stops and detentions of Southern Californians based on racial profiling. The lawsuit highlighted that these raids were not random. Black, Brown, and immigrant workers are being racially profiled. But in this past year we have also been engaged in deeper workplace and community organizing, and that gives me hope. 

Immigrant workers united in our coalition, California Network for Immigrant and Worker Justice, are fighting for the state government to provide funding for an Immigration Enforcement Emergency Relief Fund that would provide temporary financial assistance to qualified individuals and families who have lost income due to immigration enforcement activities. This month, workers and families from across the state struggling with financial hardship and separation brought their fight to the Capitol in Sacramento, urging leaders to act with urgency.

Immigrant residents in the cities of Highland and San Bernardino right here in the Inland Empire are speaking up for their communities and shining a spotlight on warehouse development proposals that are being pushed through without proper Environmental Impact Reports or input from local residents. 

And, in the city of San Bernardino residents are holding the city council accountable for huge contracts with surveillance contractors that collect data on residents and then share it on a database that can potentially be accessed by other law enforcement agencies, including ICE. Residents are organizing door-to-door to educate the community about the camera scam and they are finding a lot of support. All just before Election Day. 

Our tools of resilience, collective care and courage, are the source of our strength. It’s harder to surveil an organized community and it’s also harder to push through an unwanted warehouse development project when the community is informed. Immigrant workers are building the strength needed to ensure elected officials stand with and stand up for thousands of working families in a meaningful way. Real change comes from organized communities standing together.

-Sheheryar Kaoosji

When Flock tracks, I.C.E. attacks

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For more than 40 years, I have called the San Bernardino area my home. I am not just a resident – I talk to my neighbors and I listen to their concerns. We are too often overlooked, pushed aside, and left out of the conversations and decisions that directly shape our lives and our community. Yet it’s our labor that makes the logistics industry function. And the funds rarely come back to support us.

I have watched cameras go up across our neighborhoods, but this isn’t just about cameras. It’s about surveillance. 28 Flock license plate reader cameras now track where we go and how we move through our own neighborhoods. That data can be shared and accessed by outside agencies, including federal immigration enforcement.

My neighbors and I are against the city of San Bernardino’s contract with Flock Safety. Across the country, immigration authorities are increasingly using technology partnerships to monitor and target immigrant communities. When local data feeds into those systems, it stops being about safety and starts being about control.

Our community made it clear at the San Bernardino City Council meeting, residents do not want their tax dollars funding tools that can be used against them. Families across the Inland Empire are dealing with the consequences of aggressive enforcement. Children are left without parents and entire neighborhoods live in fear.

Is this what our city should prioritize? Instead of surveillance, we should invest in families and people who live throughout San Bernardino. The city council should build a community job center, create affordable housing for those experiencing homelessness, develop green spaces and infrastructure that improve daily life. These are the investments that truly make a community safer and stronger. This community deserves good jobs, safe roads and neighborhoods, and real investment in its future.

– Alberto, San Bernardino Airport Communities Leader

In a Year of Cruelty, We Chose Solidarity

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Sheheryar Kaoosji

2025 has been a hard year. The federal administration’s attacks on workers, its racist deportation machine, and the sheer cruelty that appears to motivate it all has torn families apart, perpetuated genocidal policies here and abroad, fueled overt displays of racism and seems intent upon pushing our communities into the shadows. These challenges are not new, but they have intensified. 

Despite everything thrown at workers and at immigrants, community has stuck together. Because of that, when I look backward at 2025 there is a lot to be proud of. 

Our work centering our members and local communities to expand awareness of immigrant worker rights in California and supporting community rapid response networks and mutual aid across Southern California stand out as a key, central part of our work. 

This year we continued to organize with warehouse workers and communities against low wages, displacement, unsafe working conditions and surveillance – both inside of the warehouse and in our community. Amazon Web Services is an integral tech component for the Dept. of Homeland Security and ICE. 

On the ground we were part of two important fights. The Los Angeles Worker Center Network (LAWCN), a coalition of eight worker organizations including the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, joined a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to challenge ICE’s stops of Southern Californians based on racial profiling. While the lawsuit was unsuccessful in winning an injunction at the Supreme Court, leading to the infamous “Kavanaugh Stops,” the lawsuit is proceeding in district court. We celebrated a major victory in San Bernardino and Highland where community members organized to stop a massive warehouse development that would have led to the loss of homes for more than 2,600 residents. 

As we look ahead, we remain committed to building power with immigrant workers through our campaign to expand unemployment benefits for all workers, confronting injustice, and as part of a broader resistance fighting for the right of every person to live and work with dignity. We’re not going anywhere and we are glad to be standing shoulder to shoulder with an incredible community. Rest up, we are going to need even more strength in 2026. 

-Sheheryar Kaoosji

Amazon’s “buddy buddy” Relationship with Trump

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Sheheryar Kaoosji

Despite its efforts to maintain its polished image as the world’s second largest private employer, Amazon laid off 14,000 tech workers, leaving thousands of families without an income as the holidays approach.

As shoppers fill their online shopping carts, thousands of workers are showing up to their first day of work in Amazon warehouses nationwide. Many are seasonal workers and paid seasonal pay. They have no guarantee of a job after the holiday season.

There’s the Amazon they want you to see – job creator, friend of the consumer – and there’s the reality of Amazon. For example, Amazon’s widespread use of seasonal employment undermines economic stability for communities and families across the country.

Another example of the true priorities of Amazon? The funding of Trump’s $300 million ballroom at the White House. Amazon is one of the major companies investing in Trump’s marble mausoleum dream.
Investing is the right word. Amazon and other corporations stand to profit considerably from favorable relationships with the administration. Many of Trump’s wealthiest supporters have become millions of dollars richer since he took office, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

So what does it mean when corporations and the ultra-wealthy buddy up to Trump? It can mean tax breaks, deregulation, and policy decisions that favor corporate interests, not the people. This isn’t new for Amazon. Not paying their fair share of taxes is one of the many ways Amazon keeps their pockets overflowing.

Amazon’s reported tax payments between 2018 and 2021 expose the truth. During those years Amazon raked in $79 billion in pretax U.S. income, but they only paid $4 billion in federal corporate income taxes. A 5.1% tax rate, far below the standard rate of 21%. In other words, while working class Americans pay their fair share, Amazon, one of the world’s wealthiest companies, hoards their share.

Amazon’s ballroom funding may seem extravagant at first blush, but it reveals the connection between corporate power and public corruption.

-Sheheryar Kaoosji

Amazon is the Real SNAP Beneficiary

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Sheheryar Kaoosji

You might ask whether a company burning untold sums on a gilded ballroom has something to hide. In the case of Amazon they have a lot of irons in Hades’ fires. 

Halloween is scheduled to be the last day that food assistance benefits are funded by the federal government. Ensuring children and families have food on the table is a basic human right. 

Yet, the Trump Administration is threatening to cut off SNAP benefits on November 1st, which would leave 42 million Americans without food assistance. What some people don’t seem to get is that the money often covers the gaps left by low wages paid by companies as large as Amazon and Walmart. Those corporations depend on workers’ low wages being subsidized by federal programs like SNAP. Otherwise some of their employees couldn’t afford to eat. 

In fact, a 2023 national survey conducted by University of Illinois Chicago of 1,484 Amazon workers across 42 states found that 48% relied on some form of public assistance to meet basic needs, like food and rent. Workers reported using at least one publicly-funded assistance program in the months leading up to the survey, including 23% of Amazon workers who said they relied on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). 

These numbers show that even while working for one of the richest companies in the world, many workers remain trapped in cycles of economic instability.

Trump and Amazon’s practices are two sides of the same coin, taking from working families across the country. Denying food to children and families is about as cruel as you can get — whether that is through low wages or defunding food assistance. 

The good news is that both Trump and Amazon’s abuses can be stopped when the people stand up and push back.  Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 in 2018 following worker demand and pressure. The working class holds a lot of power to expose the oligarchs who align themselves with Trump.

-Sheheryar Kaoosji

Statement on the ICE Kidnapping of LA Family Members

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The Warehouse Worker Resource Center condemns the recent attacks on our immigrant community and warehouse workers in Los Angeles, and the federal government’s continued attacks on immigrants across the country. We are talking about our neighbors, our families, our coworkers and members of our community and we stand united.   

Many workers were taken during a raid at the Ambiance warehouse in Los Angeles. They are now being held away from their families without due process. No one should be targeted at work – that is disgraceful, violent and unacceptable. 

David Huerta, the president of SEIU California and SEIU-USWW and a partner in the fight for justice for immigrants, was unjustly detained and injured by federal agents yesterday — we demand his release and the release of everyone who has been taken unjustly. 

We stand for the equitable and dignified treatment for all Angelenos and all Californians. 

Community members and organizations are mobilizing in response to these attacks. Sticking together and standing up for our communities is effective. Together we are stronger and the discriminatory and violent conduct and practices of ICE will not prevail in the face of a strong and united community.  

Remain alert and contact the rapid response network in your area if you witness DHS/ICE activity firsthand.  ¡Unidos somos mas fuertes, no estamos solos! 

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