Wealth & Money Quote by Leonard Woodcock

Woodcock’s sentence reads like testimony, but it’s really an indictment of how power talks when it’s losing. The phrase “what they called a second inflation alert” is doing quiet damage: he’s not disputing inflation outright so much as mocking the branding of it. “Alert” sounds like a public-safety bulletin, a neutral warning; Woodcock frames it as a political label, deployed to recast a labor win as a national emergency. By saying “what they called,” he pulls the curtain back on the administration’s vocabulary and invites listeners to hear the messaging operation behind it.

The stakes sit in the specific reference to the “General Motors settlement.” In the early 1970s, inflation was real, but so were corporate profits, price hikes, and the Vietnam-era fiscal hangover. Woodcock, then a leading auto union figure, is pushing against a familiar tactic: isolate wage increases as the villain while treating corporate pricing decisions as natural weather. The administration “branded” the settlement “inflationary and bad for the country” - a neat bit of moral inversion where workers asking for a fair share become saboteurs of the public good.

His intent is defensive and offensive at once. He’s defending collective bargaining as legitimate economic democracy, and he’s attacking the state’s attempt to deputize patriotic language against labor. The subtext: when government speaks in “alerts,” it’s often not warning citizens; it’s disciplining them.