In recent years, competition authorities across the world have departed from their historical reluctance to engage with labour markets and are increasingly focusing on limiting the ability of employers to exploit workers in their pursuit of profits. While the ongoing debates on the application of competition law to labour markets have largely concentrated on the ability of employers to suppress wages and impose onerous terms on workers either unilaterally or through concerted action, the potential of monopsonistic employers to engage in wage discrimination among different categories of employees has received little academic attention. Building on the extensive economic literature on gender wage disparity and monopsonistic discrimination, this article demonstrates how employers enjoying market power are able to exploit socio-economic constraints on women’s labour mobility to remunerate them less than male counterparts. It argues that such monopsonistic wage discrimination constitutes a violation of EU competition law, and as such, competition law should complement constitutional guarantees and labour legislation as part of a broader regulatory framework to promote gender wage equality.
