New words for Ed Pickford’s ‘Workers Song’
Come all of you mothers Who toil night and day By hand and by brain Without any pay Who for centuries long past Have made the world’s bread Have bled for your children And counted your dead. In the factories and mills Hospitals and schools You’ve often been told To follow the rules Your skills are not valued The men run the job With unequal pay, Your pride they have robbed. But when the sky darkens And the money gets hard, Who’s given a spade And then pushed to the yard? The family to feed, By the work of your hand When you never owned One handful of land. She’s the first one to starve She’s the first one to die She’s the first one in line For that “pie in the sky” And she’s always the last When the cream is shared out For the mother is working When the husbands are out When it comes to your body, And the rights that you own, It’s been made a prison, Enslaved in your home, You are blamed for the rape, And the pregnancy too, And now the decisions Are not up to you. All of these things The mother has done From tilling a field To bearing the young Yoked to the plough Since time first began And always expected to carry the man