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Daily Inspiration Quote by George Meany

"Anybody who has any doubt about the ingenuity or the resourcefulness of a plumber never got a bill from one"

About this Quote

The line lands like a working-class rimshot: if you think plumbers are just brawn and wrenches, wait until you see how cleverly they can translate chaos into cash. George Meany, a labor titan who spent decades fighting to make skilled trades visible and politically potent, isn’t really taking a swipe at plumbers. He’s taking a swipe at everyone who underestimates them.

The joke’s mechanism is simple and sharp. “Ingenuity” and “resourcefulness” usually get applauded in entrepreneurs and executives; Meany reroutes those praise-words to a trade that polite society often treats as background labor. The punchline - “never got a bill from one” - flips the power dynamic. The customer, accustomed to being the evaluator, becomes the one humbled by expertise they can’t easily audit. You can argue with a manager. You can’t argue with a leak you don’t understand.

Subtext: skilled labor holds leverage because it traffics in opaque knowledge. When your basement is flooding, the plumber isn’t selling time; they’re selling the gap between your panic and their competence. The bill becomes proof of value and a reminder that “blue-collar” doesn’t mean unsophisticated - it can mean strategically indispensable.

In Meany’s era, unions were battling a cultural narrative that treated trades as lesser than “professional” work, even as the postwar economy ran on infrastructure, housing, and maintenance. This quip does what Meany often did: defend labor without sermonizing, using humor to make respect feel inevitable.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Meany, George. (2026, January 15). Anybody who has any doubt about the ingenuity or the resourcefulness of a plumber never got a bill from one. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/anybody-who-has-any-doubt-about-the-ingenuity-or-105116/

Chicago Style
Meany, George. "Anybody who has any doubt about the ingenuity or the resourcefulness of a plumber never got a bill from one." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/anybody-who-has-any-doubt-about-the-ingenuity-or-105116/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Anybody who has any doubt about the ingenuity or the resourcefulness of a plumber never got a bill from one." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/anybody-who-has-any-doubt-about-the-ingenuity-or-105116/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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George Meany (August 16, 1894 - January 10, 1980) was a Activist from USA.

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