In this article, we illustrate the fallacious discursive strategies used by governments in
their interaction with trade unions during the financial crisis. We focus on two paradigmatic
cases studies, and analyse the discourses used by center-right governments in Portugal and
Ireland to convince trade unions to sign agreements that reversed workers’ rights. In both
countries, executives played down their room of manoeuvre and thus exaggerated the
constraints imposed on them by investors and international actors. In the same line, they also
imposed constraints on themselves that were then presented as external demands (‘trajectio in
alium argumentum’). Ministers also presented social actors with take-it or leave-it offers that
hid the range of options (‘false dilemmas’) and used a discourse of necessity (‘lazy arguments’).
Finally, they explicitly threatened actors to unilaterally implement harsher measures in case of
non-agreement (‘Ad Baculum argumentum’).
