Daily Inspiration Quote by Leonard Woodcock

“At the end of 1964, wholesale prices had been relatively stable for some years” reads like a neutral line from a government bulletin. Coming from Leonard Woodcock, a labor activist who spent his life translating economic trends into bargaining power, that dryness is the point. He’s establishing baseline reality before the story turns. Stability becomes a measuring stick, a calm before the disruption that would define the late 1960s and 1970s: inflation, wage fights, and the widening sense that the postwar deal was fraying.

The specific intent is strategic. By anchoring the timeline at “end of 1964,” Woodcock pins down a moment just before the Great Society spending ramped up, Vietnam escalated, and global competition began to bite harder. “Wholesale prices” signals he’s talking upstream, where cost pressures start before they hit consumers. It’s a way of saying: don’t blame workers for rising prices later; the system changed, and it changed first at the level of inputs, supply chains, and corporate pricing.

The subtext is a rebuttal to a familiar accusation leveled at unions in the inflation years: that wage demands caused price spirals. Woodcock’s sentence quietly flips causality. If prices were stable for years, then the later turbulence needs a real explanation, not a scapegoat. It’s also an argument for memory. Political debates love amnesia; labor rhetoric, at its best, insists on receipts. Here, the receipt is stability - and the implication is that someone chose to upset it.