More than 843 songs and poems, over 343 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.
"People all over the world, and particularly ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields, and offices, are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention … Their strivings, their struggles, their methods have few chroniclers." (CLR James in Facing Reality)
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead
"In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing -- About the dark times." Bertolt Brecht
Whatever name we find for these songs they have in common a fierce opposition to the rule of the entrenched powermongers, who as they get richer and as humanity's problems grow more accute, get more determined to hang on to power by any means and at all costs.
ebooklets
- anti-conscription songs
- anti-conscription movement
- mua here to stay
- muasongs
- unionsongs
- peacesongs
- songs of the 1891 shearers strike
- frank the poet
- 1917 railway waitresses join strike
- 1938 dalfram dispute
- lloyd presentation
- bare-belled ewe (1891)
- sixty years of australian union songs
- australian working songs and poems
union songs ... a research archive selected by mark gregory