Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

These lines come from Joe Hill’s labor song “The Preacher and the Slave,” written for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the early 1910s. Hill, a Swedish-born organizer and songwriter active in the U.S. labor movement, used parody and satire to counter what he saw as religious rhetoric that urged workers to accept poverty and exploitation in exchange for heavenly reward. The song targets Salvation Army-style street preaching and similar messages that promised future salvation while discouraging collective action for better wages and conditions in the present. The refrain popularized the phrase “pie in the sky,” a critique of deferred, otherworldly consolation.

Hill’s couplet mocks the idea that workers should endure deprivation (“live on hay”) while remaining obedient and industrious (“work and pray”) because compensation will arrive only after death (“pie in the sky when you die”). The rhyme’s sing-song simplicity is deliberate: it mimics the cadence of revival hymns while turning their promise into an indictment. The line crystallizes a central labor argument of the period—that moral exhortation and promises of heaven could function as social control, diverting attention from material injustice and collective bargaining. Its enduring power lies in how it names a recurring political tactic: substituting future reward for present reform.

“You will eat, bye and bye, / In that glorious land above the sky; / Work and pray, live on hay, / You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”