Labour & Pop Culture: Worker's Song

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is Dropkick Murphy’s “Worker’s Song”. This is a very, very class conscious song that explicitly identifies the different roles of labour and capital and the enduring exploitation inherent in this relationship.

The song starts out identifying how workers need employment moreso than employers need workers and the tendency of employers displace workers with capital whenever possible.

In the factories and mills, in the shipyards and mines
We've often been told to keep up with the times
For our skills are not needed, they've streamlined the job
And with sliderule and stopwatch our pride they have robbed

It then shifts to decrying the different fates allocated (largely by birth) to workers and capitalists:

We're the first ones to starve, we're the first ones to die
The first ones in line for that pie-in-the-sky
And we're always the last when the cream is shared out
For the worker is working when the fat cat's about

The most interesting part is the analysis of the necessity of workers in maintaining the economic and political structure of their exploitation. Specifically, the song identifies the irony of workers being forced to fight in wars, ostensibly for workers’ freedom… to be exploited.

And when the sky darkens and the prospect is war
Who's given a gun and then pushed to the fore
And expected to die for the land of our birth
Though we've never owned one lousy handful of earth?

While some class conscious songs (like 9-to-5) focus our attention on the micro-relations of the workplace, this one clearly steps back to provide a broader view of the political economy of capitalism and the modern nation state. This approach undermines the rationalization of examples of exploitation in capitalism as “there are always a few bad bosses.” That is to say, perhaps, it is the system that is bad.

Yeh, this one's for the workers who toil night and day
By hand and by brain to earn your pay
Who for centuries long past for no more than your bread
Have bled for your countries and counted your dead

In the factories and mills, in the shipyards and mines
We've often been told to keep up with the times
For our skills are not needed, they've streamlined the job
And with sliderule and stopwatch our pride they have robbed

[Chorus:]
We're the first ones to starve, we're the first ones to die
The first ones in line for that pie-in-the-sky
And we're always the last when the cream is shared out
For the worker is working when the fat cat's about

And when the sky darkens and the prospect is war
Who's given a gun and then pushed to the fore
And expected to die for the land of our birth
Though we've never owned one lousy handful of earth?

[Chorus x3]

All of these things the worker has done
From tilling the fields to carrying the gun
We've been yoked to the plough since time first began
And always expected to carry the can

-- Bob Barnetson