Labour markets in a moral crisis: structural unemployment and the employment service reform in Lithuania

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article analyses the political dynamics of the Employment Service reforms in Lithuania that came into force in 2022. It is argued that the reforms were driven by the outbreak of public alarm over growing and reaching unacceptably high-level structural unemployment. The moral panic approach is used to analyse the process of reform-making. It is argued that the reforms, instead of balancing labour supply and demand, focused on re-imposing moral order in society by (a) the implementation of the new assimilative and coercive measures directed at the unemployed, and (b) changes in unemployment statistics that reduced the count of the unemployed.