I wrote verses for this song for the 1975 Berkeley teachers' strike:

The schools are short of money,
The schools are short of bread,
So we don't want a raise in pay,
We'll take a cut instead.

Oh, Mary Jane and Gene and Jim
And Mark and Sweet Louise,*
Would like us all back on the job,
They ask us "Pretty Please."
They swear that they'll fix everything
Once we're back in the fold,
And everybody knows their word
Is just as good as gold.

The chorus is the same. I wrote another verse, but I can't remember it, and it disappeared in my hard drive crash.

*the members of the school board. Our strike band was "The Board Erasers." The six or eight or ten of us in the group rode around town in the back of a yellow Masda pickup truck, singing traditional strike songs and songs we had written--for more than four weeks. It was a disastrous strike: it ended in arbitration--which we won, but the district ignored the settlement and got away with it. But a good time was had by all... --seed