More than 630 songs and poems, over 260 Authors
Call them rebel songs, slave songs, songs of freedom, work songs, songs of dissent, songs of struggle, protest songs, liberation songs, labour songs, labor songs, workers songs, industrial folk songs, environmental songs, songs of equality, peace songs.
For over two centuries working people across the world have built
trade unions. This site documents the songs and poems that they made
in the process, union songs. It includes songs and poems that are being
written today, as the process of union building continues all around
the world.
Such songs are the work of famous poets as well as men and women whose names
have been forgotten. They stretch back to ancient times and are being created
today.
'Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell. It is perhaps this fear of no longer being needed in a world of needless things that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality of much that is called work today.'
Studs Turkel (1912-2008)
