You can't write a news story about a bunch of people doing nothing, can you?

Every organization of every type starts small. They don’t all become large.

We could say the same thing about every failed startup company that was a peer to Amazon in the 90s, I guess they were all just performance art corporations.

Why even bother getting up in the morning, right?

Even large scale protests rarely achieve meaningful results. Labor walkouts, Occupy Wall Street, BLM, COVID protesters and the truckers, Just Stop Oil, PETA theatrics, the weekly marches on Washington for this cause and that cause: have any of them actually changed anything?

When it comes to how companies operate, only shareholders get to vote. I don’t like it, but that’s how it is. Convince shareholders, and they’ll motivate management/leadership. When it comes to government policy changes, convince voters and they will elect people who might implement that change.

Protesting and picketing is “doing nothing, loudly.”

I would expect shareholders to start caring if labour appears organized enough to threaten continued operations of the company.

The biggest issue with modern activism is that it acts like peaceful vocal protest is the end of the line when really it's in the middle of a wide spectrum of options. If the people making the decisions don't care about you there is no construct of words that will have any effect on their behavior. If a sociopath is beating his wife or robbing his neighbor, debate club persuasion is not the tool for the job.

How do you know what does and doesn’t work before you try doing that thing? This is why I brought up the example of Amazon, what crazy person in the 90’s thought that an online bookstore was going to work?

If you cherry pick protests that didn’t work shouldn’t I then cherry pick protests that did work? How about the Protestant reformation, the orange revolution, the Berlin Wall protests, the Boston tea party, the storming of the bastille…heck, protesters weren’t all that far away from seizing US congress on January 6, 2021.

I think that your examples of protests that didn’t work also had some level of success. A non-zero number of municipalities passed police reform bills after the George Floyd protests. A non-zero number of people have gone vegan due to PETA’s activities.

You don’t even have to protest physically anymore to invoke change, a literal hash tag took down Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly, who had escaped justice for decades.

I would also say that your own decision to comment is somewhat hypocritical because that fits your description of “doing nothing, loudly,” which you are supposedly against.

Labor walkouts have changed the lives of millions of people in the 20th century. You have grown spoiled living in the 21st century, and have completely discounted the contributions of generations before you.

It’s always a solid point when you’re like “100 years ago this stuff mattered!”

"Doing nothing" can have quite an impact on a company's bottom line. A walkout like this may be a precursor to a vote to unionize, which may be a precursor to a strike action, which may lead to collective bargaining that results in better working conditions. Doing nothing can accomplish something, and has done for centuries.

Someone already explained the purpose in one single sentence in this thread. It demonstrates to owners and other workers that some workers are organizing and willing to use their aggregate power.

If the action doesn't lead to change, then all you have demonstrated is that workers organizing is ineffective and not something which the company should fear. Its the owners that the aggregate power is far less than they may have feared.