A decade ago, the US tech giants — Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook — were seen as the very symbols of human progress. Now, the companies — especially Amazon — are seen as the very symbols of inequality, tyranny, and exploitation.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, is not only the richest man in the world but in modern history, with an estimated worth of $110 billion. Meanwhile, Bezos’s warehouse workers toil in horrendous conditions for poverty wages, despite the much-publicized pay raise that some received last year. In March, the Daily Beast reported that “between October 2013 and October 2018, emergency workers were summoned to Amazon warehouses at least 189 times for suicide attempts, suicidal thoughts, and other mental-health episodes.” It’s not a stretch to compare Bezos’s ill-gotten wealth with that of Gilded Age robber barons like John D. Rockefeller.

Fortunately, after years of unending praise — they were going to save the world, remember? — Bezos’s company is finally getting some pushback. Media coverage has largely moved away from the fawning adulation of a decade ago. John Oliver’s recent examination of the company’s culture and working conditions was so stinging that it struck a nerve at Amazon HQ.

And there’s a growing chorus of labor, environmental, and community groups treating the company as a crook that’s stealing their future. Amazon was run out of town in New York City earlier this year, and in April, Environmental Leader reported that “more than 6,000 Amazon employees have signed a letter urging the company to release a company-wide climate plan based on six specific principles.” Led by Amazon worker Emily Cunningham, the group took their campaign public and confronted Bezos and the company’s board of directors at a stockholders meeting. Though their resolution was defeated, it demonstrated that fewer young workers are living in fear of the boss.

Yet the most significant struggle against Amazon has been in the Minneapolis suburb of Shakopee, where Somali workers walked off the job last December, joined by Rep. Ilhan Omar, and again in March, protesting working conditions. “The pace of work is inhumane,” said Mohamed Hassan, one of the strikers. “Everyone feels continuously threatened by the system.”

Amazon was forced to negotiate with the workers, who are mostly Muslim, over the right to pray on the job, and the company granted some concessions. It tried desperately to portray the talks as “community engagement” rather than proto–union negotiations, fearing the example would spread beyond Shakopee. Workers claim Amazon has also retaliated against strike leaders.

But in spite of the mega-company’s best efforts, the Somali workers’ job actions proved to be the beginning rather than the end. Today, on the first day of Amazon’s “Prime Day” — the forty-eighty-hour bonanza that’s surpassed Black Friday as the company’s biggest shopping event — one hundred workers are planning a six-hour strike to demand safer working conditions and more secure jobs.

Guled Mohamad, one of the strike organizers, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “We need change. We need something.” Mohamad has worked at the Shakopee warehouse for one year and eight months, and he spoke of the low wages, grueling work pace, and management pressure to fill quotas.

Meg Brady, an Amazon warehouse worker currently on short-term disability due to a job-related stress fracture in her foot, said in an interview with a local news channel that she’ll being joining the picket line despite the threat of losing her job. “It’s always a risk when you take this kind of action,” she said. For Brady, the pace of work is grueling and dangerous, with a high turnover rate among employees. She started working at Amazon one year and seven months ago with seventy people; only five are left. The company expects her to pick and pack a mind-boggling six hundred items per hour, leading to repetitive stress injuries.

The 885,000-square-foot warehouse in Shakopee has 1,500 employees, nearly one-third of whom are East African. Crucial to the organizing has been the Awood Center, whose slogan is “Building East African Worker Power” and which formed through a partnership between the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Service Employees International Union Local 26.

Abdi Muse, the Awood Center’s executive director, told the Star Tribune:

As Amazon continues to speed up work and demand more from warehouse workers, it is hard for everyone. People are getting hurt or quitting because they are afraid . . . The biggest concern is over the production rate. [They] have to produce at such a rate each hour that is so intense. They have to work faster and faster. And if they go [to take] a break their production history goes down.