AT&T/T-Mobile Merger Job Claims Fuel Bitter Debate Over Antitrust Suits

The steady drumbeat of advertisements by AT&T claiming huge job growth if the merger with T-Mobile is allowed to go through is impossible to escape in Washington.

The ads appear daily in everything from newspapers to bus signs to broadcast commercials. Each time, the claim is the same -- if AT&T is allowed to acquire T-Mobile, it will result in 96,000 new jobs, plus 5,000 jobs brought back to the U.S. from overseas. The ad seems to imply that AT&T will help spur job growth in the struggling U.S. economy to an extent that even the government can’t manage. Of course, if you read the fine print that accompanies these ads, you’ll see that most of those numbers are highly speculative, but the ads trumpet them nonetheless.

Now, an economic study, sponsored by mobile competitor Sprint but carried out by David Neumark, professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, suggests otherwise. The study says that contrary to its claims, AT&T’s merger with T-Mobile will almost certainly result in the loss of thousands of jobs as redundancies are eliminated, staff streamlined and costs reduced. The Neumark study claims that previous AT&T mergers have resulted in significant job losses and that in the period leading up to the merger, AT&T was already shedding U.S. jobs. The study also noted that during the same period T-Mobile was adding jobs, a trend the study indicated would be reversed after the merger.