Why did labor songs give workers something to sing about?

Has anyone ever written a song about Microsoft? What about a ballad that sings the praises of the flat tax?

Of course not.* There’s nothing that stirs the blood about the process of aggregating capital and investing it at a profit.

But when the factor of production that’s being aggregated isn’t capital but labor, and when those aggregated workers use their concentration of power to bargain on equal terms with their employer—that’s the stuff of songs and ballads. In fact, the iconic national anthem of the labor movement, “Solidarity Forever,” sung to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” celebrates the very act of workers joining together and staying together:

When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?
But the union makes us strong.

There are hundreds of labor songs, many, like “Solidarity Forever,” written a century ago about the labor unrest that erupted around the turn of the last century, some composed more recently about job-destroying technology. And a healthy share of them were written and/or sung by Joe Glazer, the labor union activist known as labor’s troubadour, who died in September at the age of 88 and whose life was celebrated in a series of events in early December.

I am in no way objective about Joe Glazer or the songs he sang. I grew up listening to labor songs on Wisconsin summer evenings at the University of Wisconsin’s School for Workers, where my father taught; my mother said that the first song I learned was “Solidarity Forever.” Joe and his wife Mildred were longtime friends of my parents. When my father was retired by the University of Wisconsin, Joe came out to Madison and sang a talking blues number called “The Ballad of Jack and Kitty Barbash.” My mother contributed the words to many of the old labor songs she had archived to Joe’s songbook, “Songs of Work and Freedom.” And although Joe was in Florida when my mother died last winter, her memorial services ended with one of her favorite Joe Glazer songs, “The Mill Was Made of Marble”:

I dreamed that I had died, and gone to my reward,
A job in heaven’s textile plant, on a golden boulevard.
Where the mill was made of marble, the machines were made out of gold.
And nobody ever got tired, and nobody ever grew old.

Joe must have written hundreds of songs and sung hundreds more. Some were written for special occasions—a strike or an election. Others are about basic workplace and political issues that ring as true today as when they were written. If you think that the lack of pension protection is a new issue, listen to a bit of “Too Old to Work, Too Young to Die,” which Glazer wrote around a phrase that Walter Reuther, the legendary United Auto Workers president, used to use:

Too old to work, too old to work,
When you’re too old to work and you’re too young to die,
Who will take care of you, how’ll you get by,
When you’re too old to work and you’re too young to die?

They put horses to pasture, they feed them on hay.
Even machines get retired some day.
The bosses get pensions when their days are through,
Fat pensions for them, brother, nothing for you.

Joe wrote “The Giveaway Boys” about a Republican administration that came to Washington determined to privatize federal programs—more than fifty years ago.

The giveaway boys in Washington are busy as can be.
They’re giving away the TVA and the U.S. treasury.
They robbed us of the offshore oil and they have just begun,
The giveaway boys, the giveaway boys, down in Washington.

His “Unemployment Compensation Blues” spotlighted an issue that’s still with us: employment insecurity in a seemingly prosperous economy.

There are ten men waiting in the unemployment line,
One got rejected and then there were nine.
Unemployment compensation blues, blue as I can be.

One by one, as the song proceeds, the men in the unemployment line leave—claims rejected, benefits exhausted, blamed for losing their jobs—although none of them are actually able to get a job. The song ends with a familiar-sounding rosy report:

There are no men waiting in the unemployment line.
The recession is over, everything is fine!
Unemployment compensation blues, blue as I can be.

Unions are, at bottom, economic institutions, just like corporations. Unions aggregate labor, companies aggregate capital, both to exercise economic power. Why have corporations inspired–what, exactly?—while unions inspired a century of songs while the other aggregators.

Maybe it’s because labor unions produce more than economic results. As my father, a prominent labor economist, observed, unions bargain not only for wages and other economic benefits but for fairness and workplace equity. Grievance procedures allow employees to appeal unfair actions to an impartial arbitrator. Strikes give employees the same right employers have, to say no, to wages that aren’t high enough or to jobs with no health insurance, and make it stick. Unions, in other words, even the workplace playing field. As Pete Seeger’s “Talking Union,” put it,

The boss won’t listen when one guy squawks,
But he’s got to listen when the union talks.
And he’d better…He’d get mighty lonesome,
If everybody decided to walk out on him.

Joe Glazer was lucky to live and work in what we can now see was a golden age for the labor movement, from about the New Deal’s Wagner Act, which protected workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively, to the Republican ascendance that started in the ‘eighties, when the rights the Wagner Act granted to aggregators of labor were taken back and the rights of aggregators of capital were expanded. It was a time when unions were, indeed, something to sing about.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

* Although to be fair, my old friend, the late Maureen Drummy, once played me a record of conservative folk songs, the only one of which I remember was “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Buckley,” sung to the tune of “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey.” I don’t remember much about the song, except the feeling that conservative folk music, to borrow from Samuel Johnson, was like seeing a dog walk on his hind legs: You marveled not that it was done so well but that it was done at all.