Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Gompers

Arbitration sounds civilized until you ask who gets to define “civilized.” Gompers, speaking as labor’s most influential American tactician, doesn’t reject negotiation; he rejects the fantasy that negotiation is neutral. The line works because it punctures the comforting idea that two parties can meet “in the middle” when one party owns the factory, the courts, the press, and often the police. In that scenario, arbitration isn’t a bridge, it’s a trapdoor.

The lion-and-lamb image is blunt, almost cartoonish, and that’s the point: it shames the genteel language of industrial peace by translating it into predator logic. “Found inside the lion” is darkly comic and morally clarifying. It implies that the outcome is pre-decided; arbitration becomes a ritual that launders power into legitimacy. You didn’t lose because the system is rigged, the story goes. You lost because you were “reasonable” and accepted the rules.

Context matters. Gompers built the American Federation of Labor in an era of strikebreaking, injunctions, blacklists, and company towns, when “compromise” was frequently offered at the barrel end of state authority. He’s warning workers not to be seduced by procedure when procedure is controlled by their adversary. The subtext is strategic: labor can bargain, but only from a position that makes bargaining real - organization, leverage, the credible threat of withholding labor. Without that, arbitration is just the lion requesting civility before dinner.