It’s literally a bumper-sticker sentiment — “Labor Unions: The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend” — but that doesn’t make it any less true. The labor movement was the catalyst for the 40-hour work week through a series of strikes and labor stoppages across various industries in the early 20th century. In the days before mass communication, organizers used word of mouth to spread news of such actions. They also wrote and disseminated songs to inspire, motivate and (to a degree) propagandize in the name of solidarity.
As a result, the American songbook has plenty of labor tunes, and the best of them tended to come from the Industrial Workers of the World. One of the union’s most prolific songwriters, Joe Hill, became an IWW martyr and the subject of a famous song in his own right after he was framed for murder and executed in Utah in 1915. Thanks to Hill and some other writers, the Wobblies had so many songs they began publishing them in “The Little Red Songbook” starting in 1909.
As often happens in the folk tradition, many of those songs repurposed existing melodies that would have been familiar at the time. One of my favorites is “Fifty Thousand Lumberjacks,” a song celebrating a widespread timber strike in 1917 in the Pacific Northwest (there were similar actions in 1916–17 in the Midwest and the South) that prompted the arrest of some IWW leaders, and ultimately resulted in increased wages and shorter hours for lumberjacks.
Set to the tune of the wry drinking song “Portland County Jail,” “Fifty Thousand Lumberjacks” first appeared in the “Little Red Songbook” in 1918. The song described squalid living conditions, extolled the importance of solidarity and cast a skeptical eye at what was often hostile coverage in the press. “Fifty Thousand Lumberjacks” has become something of a forgotten rallying cry, and Joe Glazer’s 1954 take on “Songs of the Wobblies” (reissued in 1977) is the best of a handful of available recorded versions. It’s a fitting anthem for Labor Day, at a time when the need for solidarity, in the face of white supremacy, police brutality and anti-union crusades, has rarely been clearer.