In the works for over 5 years, my new book Strike While the Needle is Hot!: A Discography of Workers’ Revolt is out now! You can get a copy of the book HERE. In addition, my co-author Kennedy and I assembled a mixtape of 24 songs from the project which you can find HERE.
In 2017–2018, while I was working on my Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels, I came across a handful of records that were produced as part of labor strikes. I noted them, but didn’t think about them much beyond another subset of records produced by unions. Then in 2021, my friend Chris-X in London sent me a copy of the 7″ record Ford Workers On Strike, produced by the Ford Workers’ Combine. The record certainly looked cool, but unlike many union records, it actually sounded good, too! It turns out that the Workers’ Combine was an autonomist workers’ organization at the Ford plants in the UK, which in 1978 called for a wildcat strike. The strike was so successful—15,000 workers initially walked off the job, growing over a couple weeks to 57,000—that the official union had to approve the strike to save face. Some of the workers, including those involved in the record, were part of the autonomist Marxist organization Big Flame. Big Flame were initial translators of much of the Italian workerist texts into English, and these Italians had been producing records as part of their social struggles since the early 1960s, which helps explain this incredible use of the vinyl record as a piece of agit prop. The record consists of field recordings from marches and pickets (produced with the support of London’s Local Radio Workshop), worker’s talking, and a couple great songs. The sleeve is also chock full of information, and the insert includes the lyrics and chords to the songs (so you can follow along or go out and play them!) and a lot of information about the strike.
The Ford record got me digging through my collection, pulling out a couple dozen more examples of incredible strike records, which made me realize these weren’t a lark, but an important tradition of worker militancy that has previously gone completely unacknowledged. With Kennedy’s help I tracked down 80 of these records, from 14 countries and in 9 different languages. It is important to point out that these are not records about strikes, but of them. They constitute an important part of workers’ communication strategy, both inside their factories and outside. Today, as archival objects, they are doorways into struggles long forgotten by those not involved, many of which barely show up online, if at all.
And they tell many overlapping stories. They broadly tract an arc of worker militancy from the mid-1960s through 1990, with a utopian thrust throughout the 70s or worker occupation and control, a more conservative turn towards keeping workplaces open throughout the 1980s, and stories of incredible struggle but ultimate defeat with the UK Miners’ Strike in 1984–85 and beyond. In addition, the records show us a turn from a celebration of shared worker and Leftist music standards in the 1960s and early 1970s (“L’Internationale,” “Red Flag,” etc.) to experiments with more popular idioms, sometimes very successful folk rock or calypso, other times pretty terrible attempts at pop rap and pop rock. The book also traces the stories of shifting protagonists, how intensive social struggles such as strikes force people to challenge status quo understandings of themselves, and how workers can become musicians and musicians can become organizers.
The book is very exciting, and is not only filled with incredible history, but also so many ideas that are relevant to the insurgent labor movement we have today. Kennedy and I have also been talking about these ideas on a series of podcasts and radio shows, which you can listen to in these spots:
Our online Book Launch for labor organizers
Final Straw podcast/radio
Guest appearance on WFMU’s This is the Modern World
Labor Jawn podcast
My Labor Radio
