Amazon.com said it would recruit 4,000 workers in Britain this year, including at fulfilment centres in Wakefield and Knowsley, taking its permanent workforce to 75,000 and making it one of the country’s top-10 private-sector employers.
The company, which held its biggest ever “Prime Day” global shopping event on July 12 and 13, said 56% of its new hires in its British operations teams in the first half of the year were previously unemployed or had joined directly from education.
At the same time, Amazon AMZN.O has offered to halt online selling and marketing practices EU antitrust regulators regard as anti-competitive to try to end two investigations and avoid a possible hefty fine, ahead of EU rules that will target such methods from next year.
The European Commission in 2020 charged Amazon with using its size, power and data to push its own products and gain an unfair advantage over rival merchants that also use its platform.
The U.S. online retail giant has offered to refrain from using sellers’ data for its own competing retail business and its private label products, the EU competition said on Thursday.
It will treat sellers equally when ranking their offers for the “buy box” on its website that generates the bulk of its sales, confirming a Reuters story. Read full story
It will also set up a second buy box for a rival product if it differs substantially in price and delivery from the product in the first box.
(Reuters)