From the recording Hands
Lyrics
No Sweat
© 1999 Bev Grant/Pat Humphries
www.emmasrevolution.com
We sew the clothes, the ones that you buy.
We can’t afford them for ourselves, the price is too high.
Our families need food. We don’t need name brands.
We’d just like a fair share of the money that’s made off of our working hands.
Chorus: We need the right to organize. No sweat!
No force overtime. No sweat!
Clean drinking water. No sweat!
Clean air to breathe.
No bosses screaming, no forced pregnancy tests
The right to speak and be heard.
We are workers spreading the word. No sweat!
There’s lint in the air, our lungs are on fire.
We work behind tall cement walls topped with barbed wire.
We don’t have a voice, so we can’t complain.
They just kick us out whenever we shout or cry out in pain.
Chorus
Bridge: They call us sweatshop workers.
We live from hand to mouth.
We took the jobs you lost up north
When the companies moved south.
We don’t have a union, we barely get by.
We need your support, we need you to join in
When you hear our cry.
Chorus
Our wages are low, our hours are long.
They dock our pay if we do anything they say is wrong.
They hire us girls. They think we’ll obey,
But we feel the power when we work together and when we say: No Sweat!
Chorus