Next Monday is Labor Day in the United States.  The holiday dates to 1894, when the nation was emerging from a long and violent railroad strike at a time when trains were Americans’ principal means of long-distance travel.

Shining a light on powerful trusts' monopolistic agreements. (Library of Congress)

Then and for decades thereafter, music was a powerful tool that union organizers used to call attention to monopolistic abuses by railroads and other business “trusts,” as powerful companies that secretly agreed not to compete with each other were called in those days.  Music sung openly and loudly at rallies also helped to expose appalling working conditions in factories, mines, and mills.

In 1915, for instance, Ralph Chaplin wrote, and union laborers lustily sang as they marched arm-in-arm, the song “Solidarity Forever”:

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

Solidarity forever, solidarity forever

Solidarity forever

For the Union makes us strong

Rabble-rousing songwriter Joe Hill. (Library of Congress)

Some of these songs were composed to memorialize a union songwriter, Joe Hill — born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Sweden — who earlier in 1915 was tried and executed in Utah on murder charges that Hill’s supporters believed were fabricated to help quash the labor movement.

Hill, who wrote such songs as “There is Power in the Union” and “Casey Jones: Union Scab,” which described the harsh, combative life of industrial workers, most famously became the subject of a labor song that I remember hearing Joan Baez sing on recordings from the raucous Woodstock music festival in 1969:

From San Diego up to Maine,

in every mine and mill,

Where working men defend their rights,

it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill,

it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill!

Or find, for sure, some of his songs.

One classic labor tune, “The Banks are Made of Marble,” written during the Great Depression of the 1930s and sung by The Weavers folk ensemble, reflected what was then  widespread public contempt for wealthy bankers who seized homes when farmers and miners and oilfield workers could not keep up the mortgage payments.

I’ve seen my brothers working

throughout this mighty land.

I’ve prayed we’d get together,

and together make a stand.

then we’d own those banks of marble

with a guard at every door

and we’d share those vaults of silver

that we have sweated for.

As I told you in a recent posting about folk music's troubadours, Pete Seeger, shown here as a young labor-song performer, is still at it at age 92. (Library of Congress)

Those were the days when Woody Guthrie, the “Dust Bowl Troubadour,” sang of workers’ plight in the terrible Great Plains drought about which I wrote last posting.  Later, Pete Seeger, who sometimes sang with Guthrie, became the best-known labor activist among musicians. He, Guthrie, and Millard Lampell roomed together for awhile in a New York City apartment that they called “The Almanac.”

And before long they and others formed “The Almanac Singers,” who gave voice to a sort of social reconstruction of metalworking trades through the new and powerful AFL-CIO union.  In “Talking Union,” they sang:

Now you want higher wages. Let me tell you what to do.

Got to talk to the workers in the shop with you.

You got to build you a union, got to make it strong.

If you all stick together, boys, t’wont be long.

You’ll get shorter hours, better workin’ conditions,

Vacations with pay. Take your kids to the seashore.

The Almanac Singers. Pete Seeger's second from the left, with his banjo; that's Woody Guthrie in the middle, playin' the guitar. (Library of Congress)

Dorsey Dixon wrote and performed “Weave Room Blues” in 1932:

Working in a weave room, fightin’ for my life,

tryin’ to make a livin’ for my youngins’ and my wife.

Some are needin’ clothes, and some are needin’ shoes,

but I’m getting’ nothin’ but them weave room blues.

G.C. Gartin recorded “The Hard-Working Miner”:

For a hard-working miner, the dangers are great.

And many while working have met their sad fate.

Seeger, again, sang “Pittsburgh Town”:

All I do is cough and choke in Pittsburgh.

All I do is cough and choke

from the iron pilings and the sulfur smoke

in Pittsburgh, Lord God, Pittsburgh.

Joe Glazer was an indefatiguable union stalwart of song. (Wikipedia Commons)

And folk musician Joe Glazer introduced the nation to the “Union Maid”:

There once was a union maid.

She never was afraid

of the goons and the geeks

and the company finks

and the deputy sheriffs that made the raid.

She went to the union hall

when a meeting, it was called.

and when the company boys came ’round

she always stood her ground.

Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m stickin’ to the union.

I’m stickin’ to the union. I’m stickin’ to the union.

Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m stickin’ to the union.

I’m stickin’ to the union to the day I die.

Sometimes other movements borrowed songs from labor.  This old Baptist hymn first became a labor song, then was rewritten a second time as “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the civil-rights movement.

We’ll build a mighty union.

We shall not be moved.

We’ll build a mighty union.

We shall not be moved.

Just like a tree that’s planted by the water

We shall not be moved.

Labor music flowered, briefly, as a tagalong of the 1960s peace movement, when Joan Baez, the folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary, and others revived the work of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and a long list of artists who wrote and sang labor tunes.

But the union movement took a triple blow in the mid-1900s:

•  During World War II, Americans were urged to put patriotism ahead of self-interest, and many union-negotiated hour and wage regulations were relaxed.

Hauled before Congress in 1961, Pete Seeger took along his trusty banjo. (Library of Congress)

• Anti-communist groups in the United States, including many members of Congress, accused some unions of having ties to the international socialist movement, based in Moscow.  Union membership plummeted.  Many singers, including Pete Seeger, were blacklisted because of their brief flirtations with the American Communist Party.

• And in 1981, as America was already turning more conservative, and employers were speaking out against unions, President Ronald Reagan summarily fired about 12,000 federal air-traffic controllers who had walked out after violating a law that forbids federal workers from striking.  His action prompted hardball stances against private unions as well, and from that point forward, union membership began another dramatic decline.

Labor music had already changed and mellowed, since the workforce was increasingly white collar and there were few head-knocking battles outside factory gates.

But labor songs continued to be written and sung.

Some simply describe people’s workaday chores.  But others take an activist tone about employees’ struggle for representation, what they consider fair wages, and improved working conditions.

More recent labor songs have gone mainstream in sound and appeal. Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” for instance, was the theme song of a lighthearted hit movie. Country songs like Brooks and Dunn’s “Hard Working Man” are anthems to the work ethic:

I’m a hard-working man.  I wear a steel hard hat.

I can ride, rope, hammer and paint,

Do things with my hands that most men ‘caint

I can’t get ahead no matter how hard I try.

I’m getting’ really good at barely getting’ by.

But out of the limelight, harder-edged union songs were still being crafted by songwriters such as Phil Cohen of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

“The labor movement isn’t just about better wages and seniority rights,” he told me.  “The labor movement is a vehicle to inspire people and awaken them to a higher collective purpose. And there’s no more powerful and broad-spectrum way to do that than through music.”

Cohen wrote “Hard Miles” about his life as a union organizer among Carolina bus drivers and textile workers.

“I’ve been many hard miles, but one thing I know,” it goes.

“This town’s with the union where there was none before.”

The Labor Movement has rallied behind Anne Feeney, who is battling cancer. (annefeeney.com)

And today, the YouTube Internet site is loaded with labor music by singers such as Anne Feeney of Pittsburgh, whose Web site is entitled, “Anne Feeney — unionmaid, hellraiser, and labor singer.”  The first photo of her you see inside shows her yelling — or possibly singing — into a bullhorn of the sorts that union organizers employ at rallies and on picket lines.

She doesn’t tiptoe into issues in her songs.  In “War on the Workers,” she sings:

When they talk privatization (It’s a war on the workers!)

And co-operation (It’s a war on the workers!)

When they call you “a team” (It’s a war on the workers!)

You’d better learn how to scream. (It’s a war on the workers!)

Peter Jones — who was once a boycott organizer for the United Farm Workers of America and is currently business manager of a Maryland citizens’ coalition against the death penalty — is also the former director of the Labor Heritage Foundation, an organization in Washington, D.C., that attempts to strengthen the labor movement through the use of music and art.

He once told me that labor music not only helps recruit union members, it also builds spirit within the movement. “There’s something about a room full of people singing the same song that provides a certain level of unity,” he said.

As the economy here in the United States takes off [this was in flusher economic times] there are still segments of the population that live in poverty, struggling for a better life against tremendous odds. So you see, through music we can voice tremendous support for sweatshop workers, for janitors in the cities, for workers working in the fields.

Checking out the Labor Heritage Foundation’s Web site, imagine my surprise to click on a page and see the face of a neighbor, one house over, with whom I take the bus to Washington’s Metro subway just about every day.

The last I saw my neighbor Saul, we were each cleaning up debris from Hurricane Irene. (laborheritage.org)

His name is Saul Schniderman, and, it turns out that, in addition to his work as a Library of Congress cataloguer, he’s a labor historian and folklorist, president of the library’s professional guild, AFSCME Local 2910, and a founder of not only the Labor Heritage Foundation but also a labor song trio, Folkworks.

I had no idea he could even carry a tune.

“Unions are demonized and down to — what, 5 percent in the private sector, 10 percent of the government workforce?” he reminded me.  “For so many, Labor Day has become just another day off. They don’t play our songs on the radio much any more.

“But there’ll still be marches, and labor songs, in New York, San Francisco, Detroit, smaller towns in the Midwest” next Monday.

A place where labor lyrics are sometimes born. (dbking, Flickr Creative Commons)

And the labor-music genre flickers among a sort of intelligentsia that hangs out in places such as Busboys and Poets, a string of three or four, well, see for yourself in the photo (left), “food, books, film, coffee, stage, Internet” bars in the Washington area.

There, I’m told, you might even run into an old beatnik poet along with a labor songwriter or two.

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Full disclosure:  I’m a Union guy, a member of our agency’s chapter of AFGE, the American Federation of Government Employees.  But things are usually civil, even collegial, here, save for a flare-up now and then.

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On the audio version of this posting, I’ll include some of the songs that I mentioned so that you can hear them, and in full.

Labor relations have come a ways since 1892. (Library of Congress)

Ted's Wild Words

These are a few words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word that you'd like me to explain, just ask!

Blacklisted. To be barred from working in one’s field because of one’s association with activities such as alleged affiliation with a subversive group. During the anti-Communist fervor of the Cold War, for instance, many writers, singers, and other artists were banned from performing or publishing.

Raucous. Loud and disorderly.

Stance. In addition to describing the literal position of one’s feet, this word also refers to one’s point of view on an issue or question.