Union Sundown
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter who wrote many songs supporting civil rights and the anti-war movement. However he also wrote songs about other things, like the outsourcing of jobs, in the song “Union Sundown”. “Union Sundown” was written in 1983, when outsourcing was on the rise. “Union Sundown” looks at outsourcing jobs from multiple points of view.
The first two versus are about the many personal goods which are made overseas. In his song, he says his shoes, shirts, tablecloths, and flashlights are all made in Asia. He also says that a silk dress comes from Hong Kong, and pearls from Japan. He also sings about how workers overseas get paid poorly. Such as an Argentian man who manufactures cars and a Brazilian woman who makes furniture; who both get paid eighty cents a day. The workers, in many of these countries, get paid low wages because there is a large workforce and no minimum wage. The United States gets a lot of our goods overseas, because they can produce goods cheaper than in America.
In the chorus Dylan says that it’s the sundown on the union. In a way he is right, because unions have been in a steady decline since the song was written. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20.1 percent of workers were in a union in 1983. Now the percentage of workers is 11.9, which equates to 14.7 million people. He also says that greed is why the unions are dying. But it is also the greed of the unions that is a cause of decline because they ask for a high wage. This is on top of a minimum wage at $3.55 in 1983, which is historically high for the U.S. when adjusted for inflation.
In the third versus of the song he takes the firm’s side of the issue. He states that Americans complain that there is no work, but Americans do not buy American goods. This is usually because the foreign goods are cheaper because they have lower costs.