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.