Blaming the Victim – How the Rhetoric of the Inefficient Public Sector Was Used to Implement Austerity Across Europe

Public sector workers were the main targets of EU-wide austerity in recent years. Their wages and benefits were frozen or reduced, their employment numbers were cut in many European countries. This development contradicts the proclaimed social investment goals of governments: the services crucial for the success of social investment strategies are labour intensive and therefore require adequate staffing and salary levels in the public sector. The government assault on public sector workers also defies some of the main propositions of the welfare state literature. Instead of trying to avoid blame – as the welfare state retrenchment literature would suggest – governments across Europe openly took credit for large-scale, upfront retrenchment measures directed against a well-organized constituency of the welfare state. This paper claims that it was the rhetoric of efficiency that allowed governments to pursue this agenda. The rhetoric united two strategies that Paul Pierson deemed crucial in the politics of retrenchment: division and obfuscation. It created divisions among workers along sectorial lines and obfuscated the link between cutbacks and service deterioration. This paper uses content analysis of EU policy documents and of Irish legislators’ speeches on public sector wage cuts between 2009 and 2013 to assess the importance of these two strategies in the policy discourse at the European level and in the political debates of a country that was used as a poster child for austerity.