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Amazon accused of being 'monopoly hiding in plain sight'

E-RETAILER goliath Amazon is forecast to capture two-thirds of the US$3.6 trillion retail market in the United States in five years, reports Bloomberg.

One-fifth of that market is expected to have moved online by then, claims the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), which denounced Amazon as a "monopoly hiding in plain sight."

The ILSR report estimated that Amazon takes half of what Americans spend online, now that it is expanding into the brick-and-mortar realm.

Amazon increasingly controls "the infrastructure that rival companies depend on to reach the market, making Amazon a novel and particularly potent threat to competition".

By locking in a growing share of online shopping, ILSR contends that Amazon has left competing retailers and manufacturers with little choice but to become third-party sellers on its platform.

That gives the e-commerce giant the power to "dictate the terms by which its competitors and suppliers operate, and to levy a kind of tax on their sales".

Amazon has taken at least US$613 million in public subsidies for its fulfilment facilities since 2005, according to ILSR. "More than half of the 77 large facilities it built between 2005 and 2014 have been subsidised by taxpayers,?the report found, reports New York's Air Cargo World.

ILSR's researchers also contended that the jobs created by the e-retailer are reminiscent of labour's darker days, "with many workers performing gruelling and underpaid jobs, getting trapped in precarious temporary positions, or doing on-demand assignments that are paid by the piece.?

In December, the union for Atlas Air Worldwide pilots, who fly express shipments for Amazon, complained that their night and day scheduling from Wilmington to Dallas to Stockton, California, to Rockford, Illinois, and back to Wilmington. The resentment resulted in Atlas Air pilots protesting at Amazon's South Lake Union headquarters.