Daily Inspiration Quote by John L. Lewis

There’s a quiet flex in Lewis’s phrasing: “generally have accepted.” He’s not praising steel corporations so much as recording a surrender that used to be unthinkable. In one tidy clause, he turns collective bargaining from a radical demand into an established fact of modern industry - a baseline that management is learning to live with. The verb choice matters. “Accepted” implies inevitability, not generosity. It suggests the companies didn’t wake up enlightened; they arrived at bargaining the way you arrive at winter: because resistance is costly.

The context is the CIO’s insurgent moment in the 1930s, when industrial unionism aimed to organize mass production workers at scale, steel most of all. After years of strikebreaking, blacklists, and lethal violence (Homestead still haunted the public imagination), the idea that corporations would “negotiate wage agreements” signals a shift in power, lubricated by the New Deal’s legal architecture and by the CIO’s capacity to shut down production.

Subtext: Lewis is normalizing the CIO as a legitimate governing institution inside capitalism. He doesn’t say “with unions” or “with workers” but with the Committee for Industrial Organization - branding matters. It’s coalition politics and authority-building in one stroke, meant to reassure workers that the movement is winning and to warn employers that the era of unilateral wage-setting is ending. The line reads like a status report, but it’s also a claim of jurisdiction: steel is now a negotiated realm, not a corporate fiefdom.