Unions Urge EU To Widen Amazon Investigation

A trade union for the services sector on Friday urged European authorities to widen their antitrust investigation of Amazon.com Inc to assess if the company engaged in creating knockoff goods and rigging search results on its platform.

The demand by the UNI Global Union was triggered by a Reuters report last week based on internal Amazon documents that showed the e-commerce company ran a systematic campaign of copying products and manipulating search results to boost its own private brands such as AmazonBasics in India, a key growth market.

In a letter dated Oct. 22 to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and also copied to EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager, the union body’s European arm said authorities there must investigate if Amazon engaged in “similarly damaging behaviour within the European Union.”

“As further revelations of the scale of Amazon’s operations to undermine that level playing field surface, further action is needed to ensure it is held accountable at every turn,” the letter, seen by Reuters, said.

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