The End of Cheap Labour”: Challenging the Meaning of Neoliberal Economic Policy

Post-Communist countries, e.g. Poland, Hungary or Czech Republic are well known for their specific discourses on economic themes in relation to ideology and policy making. Being opposed to neoliberal economics or promoting active role of the state in the economy in these countries has meant denying the results of democratic transitions in the end of 1990s as well as recalling and restoring nondemocratic communist regimes. This concerns not only the discourse on economy, but any economic policy debate related to economic problems or challenges such as wages rise, pension reform or austerity policies. However, there have been some changes in what is acceptable and legitimate in economic discourse and economic policy making recently. The paper shall explore how the protest campaign (since 2015) of Czech trade unions called „The end of cheap labour!“ later being joined and adopted by Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) has challenged the dominant neoliberal economic policy debates creating new systems of meanings of low wages in specific post-communist political (including collective memory) context in relation to consequent economic policy changes. To show this change I will reconstruct the metaphors (as meaning making devices) which were used by the trade unions and later by ČSSD when proposing related economic policies and then show how these meaning has become core elements of several changes in some economic policies. In terms of the theory the paper contributes to the discussion on the metaphors as framing devices.