Rita Menendez
Editor’s note; Rita was one of the songwriters I was unable to locate when I returned to the Songbook after thirty years. Every effort has been made to contact her in person. She had sent me this song on cassette in response to the 1989 call. Information from documentary film maker Clare O’Leary’s blog The Doco Bug led me to a 1991 SBS documentary Overlocked and Underpaid, from which this biographical detail has been transcribed in Rita’s own words.
“When I arrived here I realised that I couldn’t get job in classic music-that was my career as opera singer. For several weeks I was thinking what to do. I decided to borrow a guitar and to start singing folkloric music.
My music from my country in Central America wasn’t known over here, so nobody was interested. It took me several years insist giving concerts everywhere before people realised that music has value and has a message. While singing the streets and wherever I found, I start to meet people of working class and young people of my generation, that artists were trying to organise events for workers. So I was invited to participate in my first project as a composer by [the Clothing Trade Workers Union] It was a great opportunity for me because I really wanted to give something to these people. So it had the opportunity to go close to them, to talk to them and to write about them. So my music after few years start a transformation: start to be Australian.”
(Rita Menendez: transcribed from SBS Overlocked and Underpaid 1989
Episode 1 of “What do you really do for a job?”)
Listen to Song By Rita Menendez
You Deserve Your Pay
“The Clothing Trade Workers Union … funded local Mexican folkloric singer, Rita Menendez to travel around clothing factories doing lunch time concerts. At the same time we would interview women about their lives and film their working conditions. The guise of a concert allowed us into factories where union delegates had not been for years, so it worked perfectly.
Migrant women were being exploited, some were starting their own businesses after years of working for others, and some conditions were so oppressive that women even had to ask permission to go to the toilet and the managers would hand out toilet paper. ”
A documentary film was produced in a collaboration between The Australia Council, the Clothing Trades Workers Union and SBS. (The Doco Bug, accessed 24/03/2022)
Song Lyrics
So you’re our workmate here,
ready to serve in this frontier land;
Working together, it’s very clear
we need to exist as a happy band.
So come on in and meet your mates,
we’re here together for what it takes
Our solidarity is your guarantee
of the union’s promise to keep us free.
Together, we work for a better way,
no matter what our race or creed
We defend our rights, for we mean to stay,
and we will fight oppression, corruption and greed.
So come on in and meet your mates
We’re here together for what it takes
Our solidarity is your guarantee
of the union’s promise to keep us free.
And who will say when you’ve worked hard
“You deserve your pay! ”
It’s the people who hold a union card
Fellow workers all at the end of the day.
So come on in and meet your mates
We’re here together for what it takes
Our solidarity is your guarantee
of the union’s promise to keep us free.