The economic consequences of the Third World War – inflation, the energy and industrial crises, and the massive drain of public resources directed toward rearmament – constitute the material context within which a profound intensification of exploitation in Europe is unfolding. Financial measures approved by various member states, along with regulations and reforms to social safety nets and working hours, all move in the same direction: extending the working day, reducing direct and indirect wages, restricting the right to strike, and governing the mobility of both migrant and non-migrant labor within a framework of increasing coercion to work. These are not isolated national reforms but rather local articulations of a broader European restructuring, which finds in war – and in the “necessary sacrifices” it appears to demand – the ideal environment for redefining the relationship between capital and labor.
The definition of the political conditions of the exploitation of living labor is the main instrument of the “great preparation” for war. It provides ideological legitimacy to choices that make life harder, if not impossible, for those who depend on wages, including migrants, women, precarious workers, industrial laborers and LGBTQIA+ people. War reorients production, investment, research and education, imposing a transnational wage regime. Against this regime, it is necessary to consider how we can organize our feminist, class, and anti-racist politics in terms of a transnational politics of peace.
Squeezing Living Labor: More Time, Less Pay
The German government, led by Chancellor Merz, is introducing a series of measures aimed at significantly extending the workday. To circumvent the eight-hour daily limit, the government has proposed recalculating weekly working hours, raising them to 48 hours in line with European regulations. This would allow for ten- or even twelve-hour workdays, with reductions on other days to ensure formal compensation. The flexibility of basic working hours, increased pressure regarding shifts and overtime, and bonuses designed to bring retirees back into the workforce all suggest an effort to extract more labor from the existing workforce.
Germany is no exception. In France, Macron has spent years attempting to introduce pension reform that would force women and men to work longer. Currently, Parliament is debating the elimination of certain public holidays to increase the number of working days. Last November, the Senate extended the legal weekly workday by 15 minutes. They argued that the resulting 12 additional annual work hours could generate over €10 billion in social contributions and taxes.
Greece serves as a model. In sectors operating on a continuous cycle (24 hours a day, seven days a week), the Greek government has extended the workweek to 48 hours, giving employers more discretion in scheduling work hours. The possibility of introducing a sixth workday or extending the workday by two hours at the employer’s discretion worsens conditions already marked by unpaid overtime and undeclared work. This is not just about working more; it’s also about reducing workers’ bargaining power further, as they cannot refuse these extensions. In a country where average working hours are among the highest in the European Union and the minimum wage is among the lowest, this reform is being implemented alongside restrictions on the right to strike in the public sector, harsher disciplinary sanctions, and the exclusion of worker representatives from oversight bodies. Extending the workday goes hand in hand with expanding employer power.
Similarly, in Portugal, the Trabalho XXI reform expands the circumstances under which fixed-term contracts can be used and streamlines just cause dismissals. Here, too, working hours are decided exclusively by the company. The workday can be up to ten hours, and the workweek can be up to fifty hours, without overtime pay. Additionally, there are restrictions on the right to strike in care sectors, and the obligation to register domestic work has been repealed, despite the fact that this obligation had allowed thousands of women to emerge from the informal economy. Thus, the definition of the new European wage regime also reinforces patriarchal hierarchies within social reproduction.
Restructuring Welfare Forcing People to Work
The extension of the workday comes with a stronger push toward forcing people to work. The reform package currently under discussion in Germany includes stricter criteria for accessing Bürgergeld, the minimum social income that replaced Hartz IV in 2023. The new system reduces protections for applicants’ savings, forcing them to exhaust personal funds before qualifying for benefits. Furthermore, individuals who miss job placement appointments or decline offers deemed “reasonable” may face suspension or termination of benefits, including rent and heating subsidies. Meanwhile, the failure to fully index benefits to inflation erodes their purchasing power, pushing people to accept jobs with worse wages.
Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy has already moved in this direction since the abolishment of the despised reddito di cittadinanza (a guaranteed minimum income) at the start of its mandate. Without spectacular reforms, the Italian far right maneuvers quietly. It is not necessary to extend the workday legislatively to achieve the same result. Tax reductions on overtime, productivity bonuses, and supplementary payments encourage longer workdays as a way to regain purchasing power from eroded wages – wages that in Italy have not increased for decades. The costs of social services such as healthcare, education, and care fall on an increasingly impoverished workforce — particularly women — while companies are guaranteed incentives, exemptions, and tools to manage labor in more flexible and fragmented ways.
This is not a return to the austerity of the post-2008 era. The tightening of social protections occurs in a wartime context marked by energy and industrial crises, uncertain transitions, and the growing importance of military spending. While not necessarily anticipating a widespread shift from civilian to military production, this scenario nevertheless establishes the foundation for the pursuit of greater profits through attacks on workers, presenting accelerated rhythms and workloads, as well as plant closures and automation processes, as inevitable and unquestionable. This power relation is what we call the wage regime, whose transnational dimension is clearly visible in a Europe at war. The important factor is not the absolute amount of spending cuts, since spending continues to rise to finance excess profits for companies such as the pharmaceutical firms. Rather, their actual political significance is the guarantee that welfare conditions, wages, and rights will no longer allow millions of women and men to escape the coercion to work.
Governing Transnational Mobility
Within this framework lies the recent European attempt to reshape the governance of mobility in a radical way. As wages increasingly dictate more time spent at work and intensify the coercion to accept worse employment conditions, European migration policy has become a decisive mechanism in this process. The new European Pact on Migration and Asylum aims to create a system of selection and punishment that results in illegality, forced turnover, and the acceptance of any job.
On the one hand, the European Union is normalizing its logistics of deportations by expanding the list of “safe countries” and allowing asylum seekers to be sent to a “safe third country,” even if they have no prior ties to it. Thus, expulsion and detention become stable functions of European border governance. On the other hand, this constant threat sustains a daily blackmail in the form of increasingly fragile residence permits, obstructed family reunifications, endless administrative waiting periods, and revocations that force migrants back into an irregular status. This creates a pool of laborers who are expected to be ready and available while being excluded from what remains of welfare and social services. The goal is to control this reserve workforce to an optimal level for those seeking profit and security who do not want to increase public spending.
In this context, institutional racism becomes another instrument for lowering wages for everyone because it divides the workforce, creates internal hierarchies, and makes organizing against intensified exploitation and militarism more difficult. Thus, war accelerates and hardens ongoing processes, legitimizing measures that would have faced greater obstacles in other times.
Organizing within Europe at War
Although with different means, expressions, and organizational forms, in recent months, various strikes and protests have threatened the order of this Europe at war. These include the large general strike in Portugal, student mobilizations in Serbia, and strikes against the reintroduction of voluntary military service in Germany. Other examples are general strikes in Greece and France, the growth of transnational networks among dockworkers, uprisings in Bulgaria and Slovakia, and strikes in Italy last autumn against the genocide in Palestine. These events reveal a widespread yet fragmented insubordination against the ways in which war worsens the living and working conditions of millions of workers across Europe, beyond producing death and destruction.
The extension of the workday, the reduction of welfare benefits, the tightening of rules that force people to work at any cost, national and European attempts to control mobility, and severe repression in the name of security force us to ask: How can we organize against war under these changed conditions? How can we establish transnational communication among those who struggle daily against the wage regime in this Europe at war? We must confront the difficulties posed by intensified command over labor and assert a transnational force against processes that share common trajectories and challenges across Europe. It is from these difficulties and possibilities that the need arises to build moments of discussion such as the “Europe at War” meeting of the Transnational Social Strike Platform, to be held on February 28, 2026, in Cologne, Germany. The meeting will bring together workers, activists from transfeminist and anti-racist collectives, grassroots unionists, anti-militarist networks, and ecological groups from various European countries and beyond. The meeting in Cologne is the first in a series of discussions aimed at organizing a step forward against the new wage regime of a Europe at war. If war reorganizes command over labor and society at the transnational level, then our opposition must measure itself at that level as well. We have no ready-made solutions, but we know that without organizing together across borders, we will remain trapped within the hierarchies that a warring Europe is constructing around us.