Hundreds of striking Amazon workers are picketing at the Amazon warehouse in SF’s Bayview District, joining thousands of other Amazon workers nationwide who went on strike Thursday morning looking for better wages and health care.

Less than a week before Christmas, KTVU reports that Amazon fulfillment center workers have gone on strike at seven large Amazon warehouses nationwide. And that includes the Toland Street warehouse in San Francisco’s Bayview District, where workers voted to unionize a couple months back. The workers say that the trillion-dollar company ignored their December 15 deadline to negotiate better wages and health care, and they’ve gone on strike across the country.

Let’s take a look at how things are going at the Amazon strike in New York.  

SFist cannot confirm that police were “roughing up and arresting workers” at this strike site some 3,000 miles away, but the tweet below is evidence that some striking Amazon workers were arrested. And mind you, the police officers doing the arresting are themselves members of unions, unions that regularly get these officers very generous wage and benefit packages.

KTVU has some footage of the strike here in SF, apparently taken around 6:30 am Thursday morning.

“We’ve made several requests for Amazon to start bargaining a union contract with our union, and they have simply ignored, ignored, ignored,” striking worker Dori Goldberg told KTVU. “We know that we make this company’s profits.”

“We work hard, and Amazon is paying us poverty wages,” he continued. “We live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and Amazon is paying us just over 20 bucks an hour.”

And above we have the not-great optics of Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos dining at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump just last night, with Bezos of course carrying his current trophy fiancé in tow.

One of the big conflicts leading up to this strike is that Amazon does not recognize the Amazon Teamsters union. The Teamsters say they represent 10,000 people at ten US facilities, but an Amazon spokesperson claims this simply is not true, and that the Teamsters "have continued to intentionally mislead the public" by claiming they have 10,000 members.

"They don't," Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards said in a statement picked up by KTVU. "And this is another attempt to push a false narrative. The truth is that the Teamsters have actively threatened, intimidated, and attempted to coerce Amazon employees and third-party drivers to join them, which is illegal and is the subject of multiple pending unfair labor practice charges against the union."

Notice her reference to “third-party drivers.” That means they’re contractors, working in Amazon uniforms and driving Amazon trucks, but they actually work for someone else. Use of contractors is a classic 21st Century method of excluding large parts of a company’s workforce from the salary and benefit structures that their actual employees enjoy. So this strike may be precedent-setting in terms of whether a company would accept demands from workers who they need, but technically do not employ.

NBC Bay Area describes the SF strike as involving “hundreds” of workers, and the Teamsters are touting this as the largest strike against Amazon ever in the US. Will this strike actually affect deliveries? And what percentage of workers are still crossing those picket lines anyway, particularly if they are contractors, and can’t afford to lose pay right before the holidays?

“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed,” Teamsters president Sean O’Brien said in a statement in the Chronicle. But if packages are delayed — and that’s still an if — we’ll see how public sentiment shakes out in what is an unusual and somewhat unprecedented kind of strike.

Related: SF Amazon Workers at Bayview Warehouse Vote to Unionize, Ball Now In Amazon’s Court [SFist]

Image: @amazonteamsters via Twitter