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Rockin' Solidarity Forever. Victor Jara | Manifiesto. Writers' Guild of America Strike Song. GmacCash | On Strike (UAW). Lisa Simpson's Union Strike Folk Song | Dan Cribbs. Paul Robeson | "Joe Hill". Why Auto Workers Are Striking.
The towering cultural and political figure, Paul Robeson, memorializes a great labor organizer and martyr in song
We sorely need one, but that first requires the unionization of millions of new workers.
The centennial celebration of Joe Hill's execution is being marked by concerts, symposiums, meetings and forums, and the publication of new books, or new editions. Labor historian Paul Buhle reviews two of these. Franklin Rosemont's Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, with a new introduction by David Roediger; and
Philip S. Foner's The Letters of Joe Hill, with new material by Alexis Buss and foreword by Tom Morello.
Joe Hill -- executed 100 years ago by a Utah firing squad -- knew the power of harnessing creativity. The Wobblies embraced songs, comics, soapboxing, and other creative tactics in reaching out to unorganized workers as well as in direct actions on the job site. “A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over,” Hill wrote in a letter to the editor of Solidarity in November 1914.
Alfred Hayes wrote it as a poem in upstate New York at a left wing retreat called Camp Unity during the Summer of 1936. Hayes met Earl Robinson there and upon hearing Hayes recite his poem Robinson instantly put the words to music as part of a campfire session celebrating the trade union icon. By that September the song had been published in The Daily Worker and became a popular song with members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting Franco’s fascists in Spain.
Casey Jones -- Union Scab, was written by IWW songwriter Joe Hill in 1911 during a nationwide railroad strike. It is a parody of a then-popular song romanticizing a loyal railroad employee.
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