Some streamers boycott Twitch Prime Day to support the strike of Amazon workers

“What is this if not a clear proof that digital professions including streaming are full scale work,” Anar Mekhtiev, founder & CEO of DeStream says, “and content creators have the same level of social solidarity towards other employees such as loaders or cash desk operators”.

The story taking place these days is “the streamers’ strike” happening on Amazon-owned Twitch. Quite a few of them decided to skip supporting the company’s Prime Day and even went offline for July 15–16 to join an international strike on Amazon locations around the globe.

Twitch Prime Day is a promo event that featured 27 streamers in two 12-hour broadcasts, one on each of Prime Day’s: during the stream, selected streamers presented the items and showed off gameplay from some of this year’s upcoming games. All items could be bought (or, in the games’ case, pre-ordered) directly from the stream. TubeFilter lists those 27 content creators.

Meanwhile, quite a few popular authors decided to cease any publications these days and made a call to their followers to avoid watching streams. They prepared posts and explanatory videos to deliver the message that Amazon treats its workers unfair and the company’s personnel in Germany have decided to strike due to them feeling they are getting unfair pay. Also in Minnesota other Amazon workers had a strike because of unsafe working conditions.

The list of boycotting content creators (and public activists and politicians) is long enough, here are just a few names: Waypoint’s Patrick Klepek and Rogue One screenwriter Gary Whitta, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, Erin Murphy and TheLitCritGuy.

“We already saw streamers making big progress in charity and social programs fundraising, now they stand up for the least protected,” Anar Mekhtiev adds, “we are witnessing how content creators gain more and more social responsibility, and streaming platforms and companies behind them will have to adjust their policies accordingly.”

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