SPIN DOCTORS’ DICTIONARY – CONFIDENTIAL!

This dictionary is designed for employers and governments to avoid calling a spade a spade or revealing their hand.

Balanced: the balance is tipped in favour or employers and their profits

Boost investment: corporate tax cuts

Budget surplus: holy grail of neoliberalism

Challenge: crisis

Coercion: use when trade unions place bans, go-slows, take strike action during bargaining

Competitive – make Australia competitive: slash wages and working conditions to third world levels

Compliance: obeying bad, anti-worker laws

Compromise: trade unions abandon their class interests

Consultation: justify any decision by saying you have consulted

Cooperation: class collaboration

Deregulation: removal of any restrictions on business operations, safety standards, etc

Easy – it won’t be easy: signals tough, regressive measures hurting social security recipients and workers

Economic stimulus: tax cuts for rich and corporations, rapid depreciation of capital expenditure

Extortion: pressure applied during bargaining by trade unions

Efficiency: greater efficiency means larger profits

Fairer: benefit employers

Fiscal discipline: budget cuts that hurt the poor and working people

Flexibility: as in flexibility for the bosses

Free markets: unchecked monopoly capital profiteering

Hard decision: hits workers or social security recipients while pretending to show empathy

Have a go to get a go: if you didn’t get a go, then you’re a bludger

Head winds: difficult external factors, use as an excuse for poor economic results

Ideological – don’t be ideological: employer or government demand that the recipient adopt the ideological position of the person issuing the demand

Job creation: tax cuts for rich and corporations

National interests: employers’ interests – profits

Persuasion: black mail by a government

Productivity – such as increase productivity: increase profits by increasing output per worker e.g. two workers doing the work of three and being paid less for their extra effort or job destruction through use of new technology

Live within our means: cut social spending and public services

On board: ignore e.g. say ‘I’ll take that on board’ during negotiations meaning ‘No way I’m doing that’

Recovery: recovery for profits at the expense of workers’ incomes

Red tape: regulations, cutting red tape means deregulation

Remarkably resilient: not doing well, implying blame on external factors

Savings: use in budgets meaning cuts

Simplify: gut in relation to awards or enterprise agreements

Simpler: fewer rights or protections

Simplify: deregulate

Softer revenue environment: decline in sales

Target: exclude those who should be included

Tax system to support jobs and investment: tax cuts for rich and corporations