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

Workers Take Legal Action Against Amazon

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Inland Empire Warehouse Worker Sues Amazon for Disability Discrimination and Retaliation After Speaking Up Following a Workplace Injury

ONTARIO, Calif. – Juan Loera, a former Amazon warehouse worker in San Bernardino, filed a lawsuit Thursday against Amazon alleging the corporation failed to accommodate and then wrongfully terminated him after he suffered a life-altering workplace injury and spoke up for worker safety.

After two years of working at Amazon warehouses in San Bernardino, the nation’s largest hub for warehousing and logistics, Mr. Loera sustained injuries related to repeatedly pushing and pulling heavy boxes – many over 50 pounds.

“Warehouse work can be very dangerous work,” Mr. Loera said. “When I started talking to my coworkers and finding out that many had also been injured on the job I knew we had to say something to protect our safety. As my lawsuit alleges, when we spoke up that’s when Amazon clamped down. They accommodated my work restrictions after my injury at first but then suddenly forced me out on unpaid leave, even though I was still able to work. I was later fired by a single email. What Amazon did was very hard on my family. We depended on my job to pay for our house, food, and monthly expenses for my children.”

Amazon’s warehouse operations are dramatically more dangerous for workers than the rest of the industry. According to a report by the Strategic Organizing Center, in 2024 the serious injury rate at Amazon warehouses was almost double the rate at non-Amazon warehouses. While Amazon employed 39% of all U.S. warehouse workers in 2024, the company was responsible for more than half (56%) of all serious injuries in the industry.

“As we allege in the lawsuit, Juan sacrificed his health for Amazon, and they repaid him by placing him on unpaid leave and eventually terminating him,” said Lauren Teukolsky, an attorney representing Mr. Loera. “Juan is taking an important step to hold this corporation responsible for its treatment of injured workers and the health and safety of the people on which Amazon depends for its profit.”

Workplace Safety Crisis at Amazon

The Strategic Organizing Center has analyzed data that Amazon and other employers provided to OSHA annually from 2017 to 2023. All employers are legally required to submit annual injury and illness reports to OSHA for any warehouse, delivery, grocery or wholesale trade facility with 20 or more employees. Amazon reported injury and illness information for 1,073 warehouse, logistics and delivery facilities in 2023. Those reports covered an average annual workforce of 742,654 in 2023.

Every year, tens of thousands of Amazon workers are injured on the job. In 2023, there were 38,348 total recordable injuries—defined as those requiring medical treatment beyond first aid or requiring time off a worker’s regular job—at Amazon facilities. The vast majority of these were serious: 36,170, or 94 percent, of the injuries, were categorized as either light duty or lost time injuries—that is, injuries where workers were hurt so badly that they were either unable to perform their regular job functions (light duty) or forced to miss work entirely (lost time).

According to a May 2024 report from the National Employment Law Project, “Injuries at Amazon warehouses are much more likely to be serious enough to require time off work or job transfer than at other comparable warehouse employers (with at least 10 facilities that employ 1,000 or more workers).”

Amazon has already faced multiple legal challenges to its practices regarding workers with disabilities and injuries, including a class action lawsuit in New York and complaint by the New Jersey Attorney General.

 

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For more information contact: media@warehouseworkers.org

About the WWRC

The Warehouse Worker Resource Center is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3), organization founded in 2011 dedicated to improving working conditions in the warehouse industry in Southern California. We focus on education, advocacy and action to change poor working conditions in the largest warehousing hub in the country.

About Teukolsky Law

Teukolsky Law is a full-service litigation firm in Los Angeles dedicated exclusively to representing employees in vindicating their workplace rights. We handle individual cases as well as class actions.

San Bernardino Community Members Push Back on Flock Surveillance

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San Bernardino contracts Flock Safety to operate a citywide license plate camera network that monitors residents’ daily lives. Law enforcement has access to the data and they can share the data with I.C.E. and D.H.S..

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. – Community members showed up at the San Bernardino council meeting Wednesday, February 18 to call for the cancellation of the active Flock Safety contract. The city of San Bernardino currently has an $84,000 annual contract with Flock and there are currently 28 Flock cameras in the city’s limits, spreading fear in the community. 

Communities across the city have been shaken by recent raid operations conducted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.). In San Bernardino, residents report growing fear and uncertainty amid federal kidnappings. Community members are calling on the San Bernardino City Council to take steps to better protect local residents.

“I already feel like we’re being watched by the federal government, and now the city has added another layer of surveillance,” said Alberto, a San Bernardino resident. “Knowing that cameras from Flock Safety are tracking where I drive and logging my license plate makes me anxious every time I leave my house. There is no excuse for our city to spy on us and collect information federal agents can use to violently attack our immigrant communities.”

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For more information contact: media@warehouseworkers.org

About the WWRC

The Warehouse Worker Resource Center is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3), organization founded in 2011 dedicated to improving working conditions in the warehouse industry in Southern California. We focus on education, advocacy and action to change poor working conditions in the largest warehousing hub in the country.

Immigrant Advocates Respond to Newsom Budget Proposal

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In Response to Governor’s Budget Proposal, Immigrant Worker Advocates Call for Revenue, More Support for Immigrant Workers

LOS ANGELES — As the federal administration’s violence and attacks against immigrant communities escalate, the California Network for Immigrant and Worker Justice (CNIWJ) is calling on state leaders to do more to support and protect immigrant workers and families in the FY 2026-2027 state budget. The Governor’s budget proposal, released today, fails to adequately address the crisis being faced by immigrant workers in our state. CNIWJ calls on state leaders to find ways to plug the gaps left by the federal government and to support communities who are being directly attacked by the Trump Administration.

“The California Network for Immigrant and Worker Justice is led by organizations who serve and organize with our state’s most excluded workers,” said Veronica Alvarado, CNIWJ co-chair.  “We are acutely aware of existing gaps in our social safety net – gaps that were further exacerbated by last year’s state budget and that face new threats from cuts at the federal level. We call on Governor Newsom and the Legislature to prioritize our most vulnerable in their time of need. Now is the moment to affirm our California values and support essential programs and services to ensure we weather this time in our country as equitably and humanely as possible.” 

“The biggest hardships we have experienced since the raids started is that work has become more difficult to find,” said Gregorio, a garment worker in the Los Angeles area and CNIWJ member. “Businesses are closing down because workers are not showing up to work. We live in fear to get on the bus, commute to work, and even go to the store. This is psychologically traumatizing to me, my wife, and my kids. My kids who were born here see the violence from the raids and are scared they will be picked up too. Any cuts to health care or any social safety net will just hurt us more. Our elderly community who can no longer work would be severely impacted as well.”

In response to the budget proposal, CNIWJ also submitted a letter to the Governor, Assembly Speaker Rivas, and Senate Pro Tem Limón urging them to pass a budget that protects safety net programs, pursues new progressive revenue generation, and protects Californians from federal attacks. 

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For more information contact: media@warehouseworkers.org

The California Network for Immigrant and Worker Justice, formerly known as the Safety Net for All Coalition, is a coalition of over 120 immigrant and worker rights organizations from across California. We organize for a safety net for excluded workers during unemployment, and to build a resilient economy that works for everyone.

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

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