A really common strike tactic in the pre-internet days was form a picket line. Basically, the striking workers would hold up signs explaining their strike and surround their place of work with a line of people all chanting and marching. This not only got the public interested in the strike, but it also physically blocked people from entering the business they were striking against.

When workers strike, businesses sometimes hire “scabs”, or workers willing to step in and replace the strikers to make the strike meaningless. A picket line would mean that even if the business got a full complement of scabs, they would still take a huge hit financially during the strike.

“Never cross a picket line” is something union and other pro-labour parents used to teach their children, and it meant both “never be a scab” and also “never patronize a business currently under strike.”

Amazon will likely hire scabs during a widespread strike to pick up at least some of the slack. But this time, workers can’t use a physical picket line to block access, because Amazon is an online business. But it’s still important to make sure the company isn’t able to bring in a lot of profits during the strike – hence the calls for boycott online.

Amazon knows they need their employees. They just think they can get away with abusing them. The boycott and the strike are not to convince them to think anything, it’s to make it so unprofitable to continue that they have no choice but to concede to the strikers’ demands.