Mohamed Hassan looks like everyone’s favorite uncle at a family picnic. He has a stylish goatee with some frost to it. If he told you he was fifty, you’d believe him; if he told you he was eighty, you’d believe him. “I am old,” is all he says. He has a ready smile and an expressive manner. He speaks Somali, but even before the translator tells us what he said, you can see when a joke’s coming.

He also walks with a cane, a bit of a stoop. He shows his wrists and elbows — there are bone spurs, and something about the way he holds his left arm seems a little off, like it would hurt him if he tried to straighten it out too fast. “I have injured my shoulder. My muscles ache. My bone here [on his elbow] and the one on the other side are not the same.” That’s what happens when your favorite uncle is lifting hundred-pound boxes up to three times a minute, for eleven-hour days, at the Amazon fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota.

On Monday, Hassan and several of his coworkers walked off the job in a six-hour strike, attempting to use Amazon’s Prime Day mega-sale as a point of leverage. Elsewhere in the United States, Amazon critics protested the company’s connections to immigration enforcement, and in Germany, a reported two thousand Amazon workers went on strike. Some consumers said they’d forgo buying from Amazon and other affiliated companies, refusing to pass the digital picket line.

In Shakopee, workers walked out to challenge the richest person in the world and remind him that, as Amazon worker Sahro Sharif told the crowd, “We are here because we’re workers, not robots.” Amazon admitted that at least fifteen workers walked off the job in Shakopee, but downplayed the significance, noting that the center has about 1,500 workers. “The fact is that Amazon provides a safe, quality work environment in which associates are the heart and soul of the customer experience, and today’s event shows that our associates know that to be true,” the company said in a statement. “We encourage anyone to come take a tour anytime.”

The Shakopee fulfillment center is one of scores of similar Amazon facilities across the country — nearly 150, by one estimate. Goods come in, get unpacked, and are then arranged in a building longer than two football fields. When consumers make their orders, the goods go out, and workers are expected to “make rate” — hit their hourly quota of bins lifted, shirts packed, or boxes sealed. “Three boxes a minute. Sometimes four, sometimes five,” Hassan says. Even a trip to the bathroom is no excuse — “every minute is counted against you.” Some workers have resorted to keeping an empty bottle handy.

On Monday, hundreds of supporters from labor unions, community action groups, and the Awood Center (an East African workers’ group) were on hand to support Hassan and the other strikers. Workers took turns sharing their stories. Sharif, who moved to Minnesota from Ohio two years ago, began by announcing that “we are here telling Amazon they need to do better. We are tired of Amazon workers being hurt on the job.” Meg Bradley noted that her grandfather went on strike one hundred years ago in his factory. “I think he’s looking down on me and he’s pretty proud of what’s going on,” Bradley said.

The action was the third of its kind at the Shakopee facility, longer than workers’ flash action back in December, which took the company largely by surprise and nearly sparked police violence against the strikers, and longer than the three-hour strike in March. Driven by the organizing of Somali workers, the facility has become the most rebellious of Amazon’s US warehouses.

The company has steadily gotten savvier. This time, workers reported that Amazon stationed managers at every exit and made clear that anyone who walked out for the six-hour strike (three hours for the day shift, three hours for the evening shift) would have their names recorded. “If you go, we’re going to write names,” Hassan said they told him.

(In case you’re wondering, yes, it is a violation of the National Labor Relations Act to surveil workers engaged in protected, concerted activity, or to punish them for acting in concert in defense of their rights. Funny how Jeff Bezos, regularly lambasted by President Trump as an enemy of the people, has no reason to fear that Trump’s National Labor Relations Board will hold him accountable for alleged labor violations. The bonds of wealth for the few derived from the labor of the many are stronger than Twitter spats.)

At Monday night’s rally, some people had come great distances to show their solidarity. Westin Fridley, an IT worker from Seattle, read statements of support from his comrades; he gathered a hundred in less than a day after putting out a call via email. Michael Russo, a pilot for Atlas Air, which hauls Amazon products around the country, flew in from Chicago, and in full uniform and tie spoke of his union’s (Teamsters Local 1224) support up and down the corporate flow chart. “We’re all just one more link in that whole supply chain,” he told me before the rally began. “The truck drivers, the last mile drivers, the cargo pilots — we’re all hauling the same stuff, and we’re all in this together.” Erin Murphy, a fiery union organizer and former candidate for Minnesota governor, was also there. “It’s not possible for me to stand idly by and not bring my voice and my time in solidarity with what they’re doing,” Murphy told me.

While many of us listened to the speakers, a determined group of one hundred or so kept up the picket at the facility’s entrance. Using the power of persuasion, with police on hand ready to respond to any perceived provocation, the group convinced more than a dozen freight drivers to support the picket line and turn back rather than enter the building.