Ken Ficara

My grandfather was a token clerk; it was the first decent job he had He bought a house, sent his son to school He was the family's first college grad He got an engineering degree, went to work for NYC And that subway pay made a good life for my brother and me My grandfather moved up out of the booth To the same building as his son He counted change in the money room And my dad supervised construction They kept the trains moving and the trains moved them up My dad was born in a tenement: that's not where I grew up From manual labor to the Internet in two generations Father and son were both out of the union When the strike came in sixty-six They walked to work together every day In the wind on the Brooklyn Bridge By the next one in seventy-five My grandfather had retired He got to stay home and rest After working hard all his life The mayor's calling them greedy thugs Strange to hear that from a billionaire. (Hey Mike) Where were you when they cut transit funding? You didn't seem to care For the workers you ain't got no pay But for developers you give it away Why didn't you get this tough when that stadium land was in play? So I've worked hard for what I've got And I'm proud of what my family's done But I don't think we would have got this far Without those subways moving us along Now there's other people working those trains Hoping they can say the same Hoping to make a better life for their daughters and their sons