The European Union is facing a crisis of care due to demographic shifts, policies aimed at driving up women’s employment while cutting state care expenditures, and marketizing public care provisions. This article combines feminist political economy approaches to reproductive labor as an essential part of the economy with theories of care ethics to explore the European Union’s role in deepening this crisis. It concludes that the European Union fails to recognize the importance of care or address it holistically and is more preoccupied with the potential impact on public finances than finding a solution to the care crisis.

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As the population of the European Union (EU) is ageing and its working‐age population shrinking, concerns are rising about how the growing demand for long‐term care (LTC) will be met. Since unpaid care, provided mainly by women, is increasingly scarce, some EU states are becoming dependent on migrant labour for the functioning of their elder care systems. To address the growing deficit of care in the EU, the European Commission put forward a European Care Strategy, for the first time proposing a stand‐alone policy on LTC. This followed on from a Commission proposal for a new strategy on migration, calling for labour migrants to be proactively attracted to work in the EU's care sector. As the (lack of) availability of LTC is increasingly shaping EU policy, it is timely to investigate what its impact is on key policy areas, such as gender equality, social and migration policies.