Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

"You work in the factory all of your life
Try to provide for your kids & your wife
When you get too old to produce anymore
They hand you your hat & they show you the door

Too old to work, too old to work
When you’re too old to work & you’re too young to die
Who will take care of you, how’ll you get by
When you’re too old to work & you’re too young to die?

You don’t ask for favors when your life is thru
You’ve got a right to what’s coming to you
Your boss gets a pension when he is too old
You helped him retire—you’re out in the cold

There’s no easy answer, there’s no easy cure
Dreaming wont change it, that’s one thing for sure
But fighting together we’ll get there some day
And when we have won we will no longer say:

Too old to work, too old to work
When you’re too old to work & you’re too young to die"

(Joe Glazer, 1950)

After six decades of relentlessly using his union songs as radical weapon against industrial exploitation of American working class, legendary Joe Glazer was forever “too young to die”. And yet, although his songs will continue to inspire the labor movements worldwide, he is no more among us.

New York Times paying a glowing tribute today says, “First an employee of the textile workers union, then the rubber workers union, Mr. Glazer, a burly, affable man, marshaled his booming baritone and thumping guitar to rally union loyalists and sympathizers in almost every state and 60 countries.”