Ever been involved in a MERGER? Was the company you worked for the buyer or the bought? How did the merger affect you?

Not a merger, no, but sold off.

I worked for a State organisation but that was "privatised" in a very poor deal for its tax-payer former owners, via a shady bunch of New York based money men but still largely UK owned, although Stock Market listed. 

This did bring new, and sometimes unexpected and interesting, commercial opportunities so it was not all bad.

Then a decade later, the section for which I worked was sold to a Franco-German consortium, and although this brought plenty of orders from around the world (mainly the new owners' existing customers), the work narrowed to a small range of manufacturing of its own designs of specialist products. 

At least, once past one rather worrying time when many of us thought we would become redundant, the security of employment became strong, and the pay and employment terms and conditions were very good. The company pensions changed though from Defined Benefit (based on eightieths of final salary X number of years of service) to Defined Contributions (more like a savings plan). 

The company I worked for was bought, milked, the profitable parts were moved offshore and the remainder went into receivership. We were "Romneyed", I'm still owed super.

I'm afraid that breaking-up is all too common, and sometimes very underhand. Once a large company becomes Stock Market listed it loses control over its own fate. Although a lot of investors, such as pension-fund managers, do want long-term returns from stable companies, too many others are mere chancers, hedge-fund sellers, futures traders and general spivs who care and know nothing about the firms and employees they buy and sell at the panic-driven click of a mouse button.
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Some 30+ years ago, two designers of industrial screen-printing machines set up their own company called SM-Tech, in Dorchester (S. England). At some point after this their American "agents" bought SM-Tech on investment promise; did put money into it for about a year then abruptly closed it to take its intellectual-property rights including any patents home.

Now, I have never been able to establish this, but I wonder if the ultimate American owners were a bunch of money-traders called the Dover Corporation, owning all manner of different companies in many fields of work. It had already bought DEK Printing Machines, for whom the two SM-Tech proprietors had worked, in Weymouth only a few miles away; and I wondered if it was behind destroying SM-Tech as potential competition. (DEK survived, and indeed thrives, under a new owner, ASM, still on its Weymouth site and using the original name as trade-mark.)

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Much more recently, Hershey bought the long-established British chocolatier Cadburys, and promised publicly it would not close the Bristol factory. Like Hell! Ignoring all protests, Hershey closed it within weeks of taking over the office keys - it must have planned that long in advance.  

One reason for such take-overs is to give an export market in victim's country, and I have seen Hershey products locally. I don't know if the eventual aim is to render the Cadbury brand extinct, perhaps  via the "Known internationally as XXXX" lie used to crush the UK's Marathon and Opal Fruits identities.  I have not tried them, to see if there is any truth in the long-held belief that American and British chocolate flavours differ markedly.

Cadbury's original factory near Birmingham still operates, I assume still making the familiar Cadbury products still to the right recipe and original branding. It even has its own, but public, railway station adjacent to the factory, and uniquely, that is painted not in railway-company livery but Cadbury's own blue and purple!