I'm interested (and honoured) to see that Masato Sakurai has included my 1998 version titled JOIN THE MUA! It was one of 30 or more songs and poems written and performed during the Howard government attempt the destroy the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) by bankrolling a lockout of MUA members by the employer Patrick beginning on the Easter holiday weekend ten years ago.

Back in the early 1970s I wrote a version that was in a Cinema Action documentary in London one of the I wrote verses was

The bosses down in Fleet Street
We gave them a surprise
Our brothers pulled the switches there
And stopped they bleeding lies

Florence Reece was the wife of a union organiser who was so angered that the sheriff J.H. Blair and his pose of hired gun thugs were out to kill her husband she tore an old calendar off the wall and wrote the song. She sang the song in her 80s over 60 years later in the famous 1976 Barbara Kopple documentary Harlan County, U.S.A.

Just over 10 years ago I got an email from Florence Reece's granddaughter who was asking about where she could get a copy of the film as a birthday present for her father! I was able to find the address and phone number of a US company that sold video copies of the film.

More recently (2006) I sang the original song on a picket line in Japan ... the picket of Tetsuro Tanaka who writes his own songs and tunes to sing and play to the arriving workers each morning at the gate of the factory that sacked him over a quarter of a century ago! I was sure Florence Reece would have been amazed that her song had travelled so far.

see also http://tanakasanwillnotdocallisthenics.com/

cheers

Mark