Summary Teaser: Using the 2019 BB&T-SunTrust merger as a case study, Laura Beltrán argues that contemporary antitrust policy, based on the Consumer Welfare Standard, fails to consider how mergers disproportionately negatively affect women and people of color.
Gender and race discrimination regulations, such as those seeking to rectify the pay gap between men and women, often rely on legal and policy arguments rather than economic theories. However, gender and racial disparities in the workplace can also be seen as an abuse of labor market monopsony and should be studied under antitrust law. Particularly, mergers can have a disproportionate impact on the employment of women and people of color, a troubling pattern given the increased frequency with which mergers have occurred since the adoption of the Consumer Welfare Standard as the dominant legal theory behind antitrust enforcement in the 1980s.
Mergers, by definition, result in the consolidation of two companies into one. When this occurs, it is common for there to be overlap in certain roles, such as administration, production, and management, resulting in layoffs to reduce costs and redundancies. These job cuts often target lower-level positions, since they tend to be less specialized in nature and have the largest employee shares. Historically, women and people of color have been overrepresented in lower-level positions and underrepresented in the highest-wage workforce.
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