Trump’s bashing of e-commerce behemoth emboldens its critics
MORE OPPONENTS FIND THEIR VOICES AS THEY BEMOAN AMAZON’S CLOUT ACROSS INDUSTRIES
One of Amazon’s antagonists seized the moment last month with an unusual newspaper advertisement addressed to President Donald Trump.
The ad, from a non-profit that advocates less government, attacked a Defence Department technology contract that Amazon intends to bid on, calling it a lucrative handout for the company.
A top think-tank critic of Amazon’s market power also credited Trump on Twitter this month for blasting the internet retailer’s relationship with the US Postal Service.
And the head of a leading labour union said more Americans in both parties should speak out, as Trump has, about Amazon’s harmful effect on jobs.
As Trump has become Amazon’s basher-in-chief with his frequent Twitter attacks on the company and its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, the president has also become an unlikely ally for an array of Amazon critics.
Most of them have struggled for years to build any momentum for their arguments, since Washington officials mostly held Amazon up as a beacon of innovation and shoppers saw little to dislike in its prices, selection and convenience.
‘It’s open season’
Now “what Trump is essentially doing is telling the political ecosystem: Here is how you achieve your business ends,” said Blair Levin, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former chief of staff for the Federal Communications Commission.
“He is signalling: If you want to go after Amazon, go ahead. Load up your guns.”
The most direct effort to tap Trump’s hostility toward Amazon was an advertisement about the contract to provide cloud computing services to the Defence Department — worth up to $10 billion (Dh36.7 billion), by some estimates. The ad, with a picture of Bezos looking chummy next to Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, appeared in the president’s favourite hometown tabloid.
“President Trump: Your Defence Department is set to award a no-bid, ten-year contract for all its IT infrastructure to Administration-enemy Jeff Bezos’ Amazon,” read the ad in The New York Post.
“I had never seen that before,” Katell Thielemann, an analyst said of the attack ad.
Trump recently escalated his attacks on Amazon with a presidential order to review the Postal Service’s financial model, which he has denounced on Twitter as money-losing because of favourable deals worked out with Amazon.
Trump’s Amazon attacks have amplified criticisms that have been building for years among research groups and trade organisations that represent Amazon’s rivals. They have produced studies that say Amazon’s warehouses — which employ more than 125,000 full-time workers in the US — don’t increase total local employment because of losses in other sectors.
Concerns
They also question the wisdom of subsidies to attract them. The American Booksellers Association, which represents independent bookstores, recently published a similar report on Amazon’s economic impact.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, one of the largest private-sector unions in the US, representing 1.3 million workers in grocery stores and related industries, said Amazon’s investments in automation would hurt workers. Since it bought Whole Foods last year, Amazon has become one of the union’s top concerns.
Asked about Trump’s attacks on Amazon, Marc Perrone, president of the union, said: “Allowing Amazon’s unchecked growth to continue will lead to the destruction of millions of American jobs. Which begs the question: Why aren’t all Democrats and Republicans speaking out?”