The effect of corporate mergers on workers will be included for the first time in the guidelines set by US agencies for deal review, breaking from decades of antitrust enforcement.
The draft guidelines, released Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department, amplify the regulators’ heightened focus on using antitrust law to police labor markets.
If finalized, the new guidelines promise to upend some dealmaking and could spur regulatory challenges.
“I expect more labor market cases. There’s also a deterrence effect,” Florian Ederer, a Yale University economics professor, said. Companies weighing deals “will have to think more seriously about what would this do to competition in the labor markets,” he said.
The long-awaited proposal would replace more permissive guidelines issued in 2010 and 2020 and set a higher bar for mergers and acquisitions. The agencies promulgate the guidelines to explain their views on the competitive effects of dealmaking and to inform the M&A approach taken by deal attorneys, companies and courts.
Workers’ attempts to switch jobs can be harder than consumers’ product shopping “due to the process of finding, applying, interviewing for, and acclimating to, a new job,” the DOJ and the FTC said.
“The Agencies will consider whether workers face a risk that the merger may substantially lessen competition...
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