UNEMPLOYED WORKER
©Trev Teasdel Coventry June 1976


How easy it is when you are unemployed
To feel helpless and alone in your plight
Being in the doghouse each way that you turn
Knowing well how it feels to be the one who’s never right
Cast into darkness without a guiding light.


Chorus
Unemployed worker, unemployed man
Unemployed woman, unemployed hands.
Down on your luck, down at the heel
Join hands together, fight for a better deal.


Cast out of work when the big boss man
Feels that he no longer needs you.
Made to fish for money in endless benefit offices
Though the tiddlers you catch wouldn’t feed a cat.
And you feel lost like a worn out shoe.
And you just, you just don’t know what to do.


Maybe you’ve a wife who does not understand
Just why it is that you are an unemployed man
Maybe you’ve a man who does not understand
that you’re a woman who likes to work just like a man.
And your children are ragged and underfed.
Maybe in shame you’ve both wished that you were dead.


Your bills being big and your income small
You’ve sunk so low that you’ve no life left at all.
Try and drown your blues with a little too much booze
Cigarettes, bingo and bets.
Just as if the earth had moved from under your feet
You feel like rubble that once was a city street.


Maybe the isolation, it tears at your heart
Having lost any meaning that life might have had.
This life of leisure, well it would not be so bad.
If the conditions endured were not so tragic and so sad.
Only way out of this plight is to join with the workers
Unemployment to fight.