Never mention the worst possibilities or you’ll jinx them into existence

Cyprus was bracing for a non-traditional type of war this week. A confrontation between employers and workers over the demand by Unions for restoring the Cost-of-Living Adjustment (CoLA or ATA in Greek) led to a three-hour warning strike on Thursday. The present government had reached a temporary arrangement back in 2023 raising the level of pay rises to 67 per cent of the CoLA value but unions are now pressing for a return to the full 100 per cent that existed before the crisis in 2013.

In a move that surprised both employer associations as well as the unions, Labour Minister Yiannis Panayiotou made a proposal to change the way CoLA was applied by making it paid on a tiered basis, with lower paid workers getting a higher percentage of CoLA while higher paid workers earning a lower rate. At the same time, he suggested that CoLA should be extended beyond the public and the limited sections of the private sector who currently benefit from it, to all workers in the economy.

It is a cunning move that aims to give something to each side while shifting the cost of CoLA away from the government and into the private sector. For while the benefit of a tiered system will reduce the cost of the government wage bill, the increased cost implied by extending CoLA to all workers will be borne by the private sector entirely. Even though, the motivation for the move may have been the need of the government to follow the IMF’s recommendations to cut its wage bill by abolishing the index, the proposal has its merits and should be encouraged.

The impact of inflation on workers is self-evident. Wages lose their value with inflation. However, in an economy where prices are the signal for changing the allocation of resources, an automatic indexation of all wages removes the readjustment that is necessary for the sectors that are more profitable to draw the resources needed, leading to inefficiencies in the economy. In addition, the process itself feeds through to more price rises which endangers further inflation in a doomed loop.

On the other hand, the readjustment process takes a long time with workers in the meantime bearing all the costs. The proposal tries to seek a middle ground, with protection being given to the lower paid workers while maintaining some flexibility for the price mechanism to work through the system and make the adjustments necessary. What is more, inflation hurts lower income groups

disproportionately as they are unable to change their spending patterns the way affluent groups can.

Therefore, the tiered system is justified not only in practical economic terms but also on moral grounds as well. This of course, is lost to the two opposing sides which are entrenched to their positions. For the Unions, CoLA is a mechanism to protect workers’ rights, and they dismiss the notion that it is a way to protect the lower income groups which they see as requiring a distinct government policy. The Employers on the other hand see the extension of such protection to all workers as a cost that they cannot bear.

How the government will manoeuvre to make the proposal a reality is anyone’s guess. I for one, wish them success.

Moving to a quite different topic, have you ever bitten your tongue because you feared that saying something out loud might make it come true? There’s no scientific proof of this, of course. Still, psychologists—and yes, even AI—offer explanations for why people believe it. Speaking a thought can sharpen focus, trigger commitment, invite social reinforcement, and prime the brain to notice opportunities related to it. Perhaps that is the reason the government came out with the CoLA proposal.

That’s the positive spin. Personally, I’ve always leaned the other way: don’t mention the worst possibility, or you’ll jinx it into existence. Especially when someone is sick, silence feels safer than voicing darker outcomes.

So, imagine my reaction when I heard Donald Trump announce that he would rename the U.S. Department of Defence back to its pre-1947 title: The Department of War.

Trump framed it as a way to project strength. Apparently, “defence” is too soft, too woke, too sissy. But history tells a different story: the shift from “War” to “Defence” after WWII wasn’t about weakness—it was about a war-weary world eager to distance itself from endless conflict. To march backward into “War” is more than branding; it risks normalising aggression as a permanent condition of resolving conflicts.

Is Trump really signaling that war is a good thing? If so, that hardly fits with his aspirations to a Nobel Peace Prize. And if he sees war as bad, why promote the word on every official seal, document, and building, inviting it into daily consciousness? Words matter. They shape expectations. They prime behaviour.

At best, this is reckless symbolism; at worst, it’s an omen we don’t want to test.

Critics will dismiss this as part of my Trump derangement syndrome. Fair enough. You may also say that back in ancient Greece, the cradle of western civilisation, war had an important place in the pantheon of the gods. Ares, one of the 12 Olympian gods, was the God of War, not the God of Defence. But tell me with a straight face that you don’t shudder at the thought of Pete Hegseth, “Secretary of War”.

This comes at a time when NATO forces in Poland have shot down Russian drones over Poland’s airspace and Israel making air strikes in Qatar targeting Hamas offices there.

I often make an analogy of Trump’s era to the 1930s in these columns. Today, Trump’s Department of War feels like taking us back not just by decades but by millennia. If a war does break out, we may have to wonder whether our own words—or his—helped summon it.

Shush. Best not to say it out loud.