Ghosting Workers

“From the very beginning, when von der Leyen announced her commission’s new portfolios, we were worried: she didn’t include social rights or workers or quality jobs in the title of the commissioner. That signaled that workers were unimportant for her policy agenda and that rights were unacceptable for the policy agenda,” Lynch says.

In September 2024, when the commission president published Roxana Mînzatu’s mission letter, she wrote to her “in your role as Executive Vice-President of the EU Commission, I would like you to guide the overall work on strengthening Europe’s human capital.” Indeed, capital has replaced labor in EU public discourse as well as in its institutional architecture: von der Leyen designed Mînzatu’s portfolio as “People, Skills and Preparedness” until protests pushed the president to change it into “Social Rights and Skills, Quality Jobs and Preparedness.”

But when it comes to the substance, “nothing has really changed: the commission’s program wasn’t [changed],” the ETUC secretary says. “So, there’s still no legislative agenda to deal with any of the key challenges facing workers to improve their situation.”

The 2025 Global Rights Index, an annual study of violations of workers’ rights, shows Europe recording its worst scores since the index’s inception in 2014. The commission is ignoring this alarming situation: this February, it adopted its work program itemizing its most important new policy and legislative initiatives for the year ahead — and “for the first time since 2019, the program has not contained any new social legislation,” the ETUC notes.

The original sin of the European Union — promoting neoliberal economic coordination while neglecting social policies — is being repeated with von der Leyen, who is taking it to a new and more extreme degree. The commission’s lack of competence in dealing with social issues is exacerbated by a severe lack of political will. Worse, von der Leyen calls for structural changes that would have disruptive effects on workers, without even involving them in the decision-making process.

At the recent Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, she said that “AI has only just begun to be adopted in the key sectors of our economy. This should be Europe’s focus. This is where Europe can truly lead the race. Europe has everything to gain.” Europe could also face job losses: would workers agree with von der Leyen? They haven’t been consulted on that. A comprehensive policy would be needed, but this does not seem to be a priority for the president, as Lynch confirms. “And what’s on the commission’s agenda is deregulation, which would actually remove rights, for example rights to be represented by unions in certain circumstances. We’re concerned about it.”

Deregulating Social Rights

What von der Leyen is doing goes far beyond inaction or the vague notion that we are missing a “social Europe”: she is actively attacking the working class and social rights.

Under the guise of what she calls “omnibus packages” or “simplification,” she is even compromising the hard-won socio-environmental achievements of her first term. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) — whose aim is to make corporations responsible for their impact on human rights and the environment throughout their supply chains — got the green light in 2024, on the eleventh anniversary of the Rana Plaza industrial disaster in which over 1,100 people died. It passed despite some governments, such as Germany’s, putting up obstacles. But with the start of von der Leyen’s new term, and the political balance shifting toward the far right, the directive has ended up in the crosshairs of deregulation.

The commission says it wants to make “the EU single market simpler.” Heads of government speak even more explicitly about dismantling the rules. Unabashedly, on May 9 — Europe Day — at a press conference alongside von der Leyen, German chancellor Merz declared war on European law: “I hope we can revoke some EU directives.” The CSDDD is the Franco-German couple’s main target. “The CSDDD and some other regulations has not just to be postponed for one year, but to be put off the table,” France’s president said. This is what Macron and Merz, both men of corporate backgrounds, are pushing for. They are joined by Polish prime minister Tusk, who has coined the battle cry: “Deregulation revolution.” It can be said that the so-called Weimar Triangle (Germany, France, and Poland), launched as a regional alliance in 1991, is now reinvigorated by Merz primarily with the common goal of dismantling protections.

Trump’s return to power provided the momentum for the erosion of social safeguards also in Europe. The White House attacked the European social model and regulatory power by challenging them in at least two ways: the demand that European allies increase military spending, thereby cutting welfare, and the abuse of tariffs to exert pressure for the dismantling of EU regulations. But attacks can also be resisted. This is also what the EU should have done, given that it is precisely the EU’s ability to externalize the norms and standards that gives it its standing as a global regulatory power, as leading scholar Anu Bradford has argued.

But that is not what happened. “We have to resynchronize our regulation with the US as soon as we can and with the right magnitude and scale,” Macron insisted. If Europe has surrendered so readily, this is because pressure from the US has merely triggered, accelerated, and provided an excuse for trends that had already existed in the EU itself: for some time now, the so-called center right has come to terms with far-right leaders such as Italy’s premier Meloni in a common pro-business agenda.

They are bound together by a shared neoliberal perspective. As I wrote ahead of June 2024’s EU elections, “It’ll be a call to ‘rally ’round the corporations’ that European policy increasingly serves.” And that happened: as soon as Trump launched his trade war, Macron’s argument has been that “Europe should remove the tariffs it has imposed on itself.” Soon after, Meloni began repeating exactly the same slogan. Neoliberal and far-right forces bounce ideas off each other: the Fratelli d’Italia leader’s old refrain that the state “should not bother those who have a business” effectively sums up von der Leyen’s current policy.

The commission president goes even further: she is legitimizing powerful industrial lobbies to “bother” the public sphere — to the point that not only are the deregulation packages explicitly inspired by demands from the lobby group representing European companies (BusinessEurope), but von der Leyen also claims credit for them.

Taxation Without Representation

“And more simplification is on its way,” the commission president announced on February, speaking at the European Industry Summit: “I want to repeat my call from last year: If you come with good and doable suggestions, we are grateful for that, we want them, and as you see, in the first omnibuses we included already a lot of what you wrote to us.” The warm welcome given to corporate lobbyists is inversely proportional to the attention paid to unconsulted workers, whose rights these same deregulation packages undermine.

At the end of March, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union agreed on the commission’s proposal to postpone by two years the entry into application of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) requirements for large companies that have not yet started reporting, as well as listed SMEs, and by one year the transposition deadline and the first phase of the application (covering the largest companies) of the CSDDD. This compromise has been called “Stop-the-Clock,” but in truth it is a taste of a “Stop-the-Rules” zeitgeist: governments are actively pushing to turn the EU directives upside down, if not erase them. The French-German-Polish trio make no secret of this.

In its 2025 report, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights reported that “this year looks set to be even more testing. The new priorities of the European Commission and Parliament shift attention toward security and defence. Simplification and deregulation may come at the expense of weaker human rights and environmental protection.”

Adding insult to injury, while workers are ghosted by the EU, they are also used as a fetish to push through measures with a completely different agenda, much as Trump had a group of euphoric workers before the cameras when he announced the global trade war. “New factories and production lines will be necessary, creating good jobs right here in Europe,” said von der Leyen in March to embellish her ReArm Europe plan.

As a poem by Bertolt Brecht puts it: “The merchants cry out for markets. The unemployed were hungry. The employed are hungry now. The hands that lay folded are busy again. They are making shells.” So it may be now. What von der Leyen fails to mention is that rearmament — and the resulting welfare cuts — was not designed to strengthen workers but rather serve the interests of the giants of the defense industry and of an increasingly illiberal, repressive establishment.

Warfare or Welfare?

“Spending more on defense means spending less on other priorities, but it can make a big difference for our future security. European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health and social security systems, and we need only a small fraction of that money to make defense much stronger”: at the beginning of 2025, in the run-up to this month’s NATO summit, Secretary General Rutte started to speak openly about the fact that increasing military expenditure will also mean cutting social expenditure.

The intention itself is not new. Well before Trump won reelection and loudly called for European allies to spend more on the military, EU leaders were themselves pushing this plan. The idea that defense spending should be “substantially increased” was advanced by European heads of state and government in Versailles as early as March 2022. In parallel, in the past few years, the EU — founded to prevent conflicts — has been gradually reshaped to finance rearmament. The political and moral cover was provided by external threats (with direct references to Russia and indirect references to China) while the legal ploy was to present the allocations as funding for European industry (although in fact it was funding military corporations).

Although von der Leyen introduced her ReArm Europe plan in the name of emergency, this recent initiative follows perfectly in line with others undertaken in previous years to finance the armaments industry. Suffice it to say that well before the latest European elections, von der Leyen had brought the European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP) as a dowry to her political family, the European People’s Party, when they met in congress to confirm her as their candidate for a second term. Yet the commission president capitalizes on the emergency mode, both politically and rhetorically: in addition to saying that we have to “meet the moment” and that the commission will turn into a “war cabinet,” she also uses emergency levers that allow her to dodge a vote in the European Parliament (Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union).

The “emergency” framing allows von der Leyen to distract collective attention from the point that Rutte has made explicitly, namely that the increase in military spending — demanded by Trump as well as planned by the European leaders and corporations — comes at the expense of other priorities. Yet that is the plan.

In February 2024 — well before Trump’s aggressive claims regarding Greenland and the Danish government’s subsequent proposals on a “war tax” — Denmark’s premier, Mette Frederiksen, publicly argued that “Europe should curb welfare spending to deter a more aggressive Russia”; and as early as summer 2022, Macron announced: “We are entering a war economy.” In this framework, indebtedness that had been a taboo for social spending has just become an imperative in the name of military spending.

All the fiscal rules that forced Europeans into austerity during the years of the financial crisis — forcing workers to pay for the mistakes of the richest through welfare cuts and privatizations — are suddenly relaxed in the name of investment in defense, and that alone.

As for the EU fiscal framework, von der Leyen proposed flexibility for higher defense spending through the activation of the “escape clause,” allowing for a deviation from the expenditure path in the event of “exceptional circumstances.” This is in line with what happened in Germany, where even before taking office as chancellor, Christian Democrat Merz broke the taboo of the so-called “debt brake,” paving the way for billions of euros in defense and infrastructure spending.

“There is every risk that member states will be caught in a situation of having to choose welfare over weapons, and that’s wrong,” the ETUC’s Lynch says. She has “demanded that the escape clause also applies to investments in public services and welfare payments”: but von der Leyen did not answer this request, assuming she even heard it.