Amazon accused of using suppliers linked to forced labour; Better.com reportedly firing 4k staff; e-scooter sales surge in India

Amazon is allegedly employing suppliers in China with links to forced labour, according to a report from the Tech Transparency Project, a research group owned by the nonprofit watchdog organisation Campaign for Accountability. The report accuses Amazon of continuing to work with these suppliers, despite evidence of their association with Uyghur labour camps in China, and in one case, continuing to buy from a supplier that has been sanctioned by the US government for employing forced labour in China. In China, programmes euphemistically called “labour transfers” move workers from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a predominantly Muslim area in western China, to factories in other parts of the country, according to the Tech Transparency Project (TTP). Three Amazon suppliers are reported to have used forced labour directly: Luxshare Precision Industry, AcBel Polytech, and Lens Technology. Another two, GoerTek and Hefei BOE Optoelectronics, are themselves supplied by factories that have been implicated in forced labour, according to TTP. Better.com, the online mortgage lender, whose CEO callously laid off 900 people over a zoom call three months ago, is about to lay off roughly half of its staff of about 8,000 this week, TechCrunch reports, citing sources within the company. This new round of layoffs is expected to happen tomorrow. The majority of its staff are in sales and operations roles, but the layoff is believed to be impacting the whole company and will directly affect approximately 4,000 people. Better.com has employees around the world, including in the US and India, according to TechCrunch. Electric two-wheelers are on the cusp of mass adoption in India, data from the Federation of Automobiles Dealers Association shows (FADA). Sales of electric two-wheelers jumped 433 percent to 32,443 units in February 2022, compared with 6,083 for the year-earlier period. Electric passenger vehicles also rose, by about 300 percent, to more than 2,350 units. Hero Electric, Okinawa Autotech, Ampere Vehicles and Ather Energy all saw big jumps in their sales. And Ola Electric saw sales of more than 3,900 electric scooters, according to FADA. Eruditus, an ed-tech startup focused on executive education, has closed a $350 million debt financing from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to fund its acquisition plans overseas, Economic Times reports, citing co-founder Ashwin Damera. Eruditus, which is backed by investors including SoftBank Group, is in talks for strategic acquisitions and plans to spend as much as $1 billion on these purchases, according to ET. The company plans to grow its gross annual bookings by 90 percent to around $950 million in the fiscal year 2023, as against an estimated $500 million in this fiscal year ending March 31. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds