Daily Inspiration Quote by John L. Lewis

Lewis is drawing a bright, almost prosecutorial line between collective bargaining and revolution, and he does it in the language of legitimacy: employment, wages, private property, profit. In the mid-century American panic about communism, that word wasn’t an argument-starter; it was an argument-ender. So he preempts the smear. Unionization, he insists, is not a back door to expropriation but a negotiation inside the very system it critiques.

The craft here is strategic concession. Lewis doesn’t pretend unions float above capitalism; he anchors them in capitalism’s core mechanics. “Presupposes the relation of employment” is a reminder that unions exist because the boss-employee relationship exists. They are not designed to abolish it. By foregrounding “the wage system,” he’s also conceding what radicals attacked: unions bargain over the price of labor rather than dismantle the market for labor. That’s not weakness; it’s a claim to seriousness, a pitch to policymakers and the public that unions are stabilizers, not saboteurs.

The subtext is coalition-building under threat. Lewis is speaking to anxious middle America, to business leaders who might tolerate a predictable union more than unrest, and to a state eager to police ideology. At the same time, he’s issuing a boundary marker to labor’s own left flank: if you want communism, don’t hide behind the union banner. The effect is to frame union power as American, contractual, and disciplined - a counterweight within the system, not a torch to it.