EU’s neoliberal energy shock response risks structural unemployment: deregulation as crisis amplifier, not solution
Original framing: “Europe risks ‘mass unemployment’ without reform, warns ABB boss” — Financial Times
Marginalized voices—including precarious workers, migrant laborers, and communities in deindustrialized regions—are systematically excluded from EU policy debates, despite bearing the brunt of deregulation. The ABB boss’s narrative reflects the priorities of capital owners, not the 20% of EU workers in precarious employment or the 10% unemployed in Southern Europe. Feminist economists highlight how care work, disproportionately performed by women, is erased in GDP-centric models, further obscuring the true costs of unemployment.
The ABB boss’s call for deregulation is not a neutral economic prescription but a continuation of a 40-year neoliberal project that has systematically dismantled the EU’s industrial and energy sovereignty, leaving workers and communities vulnerable to geopolitical shocks.
This project—championed by corporations like ABB and amplified by media like the Financial Times—frames unemployment as an inevitable market outcome, obscuring how deregulation, privatization, and financialization have structurally weakened labor’s bargaining power and eroded domestic resilience. Cross-culturally, alternatives like Indigenous stewardship, African Ubuntu, or Japanese lifetime employment reveal that ‘competitiveness’ is a culturally constructed myth, not a scientific law. The solution lies in reversing this project through public ownership, democratic control of energy, and international solidarity, as demonstrated by models from Germany to Kerala. Without these structural shifts, the EU’s ‘energy shock’ will deepen into a permanent crisis of unemployment, inequality, and ecological collapse.