Amazon’s Minnesota fulfillment-centre workers plan to stop working for six hours on Prime Day on July 15, the tech giant’s biggest sales day of the year. Activists will protest the company’s production quotas—which they say foster unsafe working conditions—and demand more temporary workers get employee status. (Bloomberg)

Talking point: The Minnesota strike will mark the first such protest in North America since the event launched five years ago, though Amazon workers in Europe have frequently held work stoppages on Prime Day in previous years. The company has made small concessions for labour grievances in some cases. In October 2018, Amazon raised the minimum wage for U.S. workers to US$15 per hour after political pressure led by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. And, management of the Minnesota factory planning to strike next week—where East African Muslim workers make up the majority of the facility’s workforce—have agreed to relax quotas during Ramadan and set up a prayer space following worker protests. However, the company has not addressed many of the major grievances consistently raised by workers globally, including extending employment status to contract workers—one of the Minnesota workers’ key demands—and allowing employees to unionize. In Toronto, for example, third-party couriers are embroiled in an ongoing court case with Amazon, in which the workers claim they qualify for employee status and that the company blocked their organizing efforts.