Popular '80s Songs About Work Every Boomer Can Relate To

It's easy to write songs that celebrate love, wallow in heartache, or simply make people want to get up and dance. It just seems right that some experiences are memorialized using poetic lyrics and emotive music.

One topic that doesn't get many songs devoted to it is work. After all, how many of us have been sitting at a desk in an office and thought, "Someone should write a song about emailing PDFs." But some artists have given it a try, and several succeeded in capturing the complicated feelings we all have about our jobs, whether that is hating that we have to go to work at all, or thinking positively and trying to make the best of it, or the ridiculousness of the daily realities of our careers.

In particular, musicians in the 1980s, a decade famous for hard graft and easy money, when women were entering the workforce at a rapid rate, saw the beauty in writing about jobs. The boomers toiling away during that decade can especially relate to these songs, which they would have heard on heavy rotation at the time — and on classic rock stations ever since. We chose six tunes that deal directly with jobs, workplace frustrations, or the realities of earning a living, and resonated with listeners who were trying to earn a paycheck in the 1980s. 

The 1985 Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, earned three Grammy nominations and one win, plus has an iconic video that got the honor of being the first one shown on MTV when it launched in Europe two years later.

Frontman Mark Knopfler told The Guardian that he was inspired to write the song when he was at an appliance store in New York City: "All the TVs were tuned to MTV and I overheard this guy sounding off about the rock stars on the screens. He had an audience of one — the junior at the store — and some of his lines were just too good to be true." According to Knopfler, he had to get the quips down as quickly as possible. "The bells were going off in my head, but I didn't have a pen with me, so I borrowed one, got a bit of paper, and I actually sat down in the window display area of the store and started writing out the lines to 'Money for Nothing' as he said them."

Of course, most people listening to this classic tune will relate more to the blue-collar worker who inspired it than the rock star who penned and sings it, but it's such a bop that you don't really stop to think about that. 

Who can't relate to staying up too late on a Sunday night because you are having a great time and then regretting it the next morning when the reality of a long week of work hits? That's the premise behind the Bangles' 1985 "Manic Monday," which resonated with enough people to get it to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.

You may not realize that the song was written by Prince, who offered the group a tune he had written after becoming a fan of one of their previous singles. Susanna Hoffs told the AV Club about how the group met the rock star: "He really liked 'Hero Takes a Fall,'  and he would come to our shows and jump onstage and do these really cool guitar solos. And that led to him giving us the song 'Manic Monday.'"

The group immediately loved the song and thought that, musically, it was a great fit, but Hoffs particularly remembers being amazed that Prince's lyrics perfectly captured that frantic, just trying to get through it, Monday-morning feeling. Despite already being a rock star for a long time at that point, he managed to write a song that was incredibly relatable to those working a regular 9-to-5 job.

Few songs have become a part of as many iconic pop culture moments as Loverboy's 1981 hit "Working for the Weekend." While it only hit No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 when it came out, decades later, it is far more appreciated, making it onto VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of the 80s." It famously featured in the "Saturday Night Live" sketch "Chippendales Audition" with Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley, and was used to great effect as the track over the hilarious mining montage in the film "Zoolander."

Lead guitarist Paul Dean told Songfacts about how he got inspiration for the tune: "It was a Wednesday afternoon, beautiful afternoon, and I'm walking in this heavily populated area, and it was deserted. Everybody was at work. ... So I'm out on the beach and wondering, 'Where is everybody? Well, I guess they're all waiting for the weekend.'" That line was eventually changed to the titular lyric we all know and love, and the rest is history.

Well, almost. The song has been popular with corporate types as well, appearing in several ads. And in 2015, the job-finding site Indeed got band member Mike Reno to star in a spot where, conveniently, he reinterprets what the song means: "It's not just all about the weekend. It's more like everybody's really enjoying their time at work, and when the weekend comes, that's fine too" (via Ultimate Classic Rock).

The 1983 Donna Summer song "She Works Hard for the Money" hit No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. It received a Grammy nomination, and Summer was given the honor of opening the awards show with a performance of the popular tune.

The song had actually originated at a previous Grammy event. Summer was attending an after-party thrown by Julio Iglesias at a fancy restaurant, a level of cool most of us could never dream of. When Summer went to the bathroom, she was suddenly face-to-face with someone living a life far closer to most people's jobs than that of the disco queen: restroom attendant Onetta Johnson. Appearing on the television show "You Write the Songs" in 1986, Summer explained, "There was a little lady sitting there with her head tilted to the side, and ... she was asleep ... I looked at her, and my heart just filled up with compassion for this lady, and I thought to myself, 'God, she works hard for the money, cooped up in this stinky little room all night'" (via uDiscoverMusic).

Summer co-wrote the song the next day. It wasn't the last time she saw Johnson, either. The woman who inspired the tune appears on the back cover of the album with Summer, wearing matching waitress uniforms. While the musician might only have been cosplaying having a real job, her lyrics show an understanding of the emotions regular working women go through trying to make ends meet.

There is perhaps no more iconic song about work from any decade than Dolly Parton's 1980 hit "9 to 5." The title song to the classic film of the same name, which starred Parton (in one of her best movie and TV appearances) alongside Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, not only reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 but also received three Grammy nominations (it won two) and an Oscar nomination for Best Song.

The film is still beloved, although the technology and (thankfully) the way women are treated in the office are now painfully outdated. The song's lyrics are more timeless, helping it stay an anthem for working women long after it was released. It was even sampled by Pitbull for his 2024 song "Powerful Women."

Still, while boomers might have been able to relate to the song in the 1980s, the work landscape has changed so drastically in the 21st century that Parton reimagined her tune in a 2021 Super Bowl ad for the e-commerce company Squarespace. The new version changes the famous lyric to "5 to 9," highlighting that for many millennials and Gen Zers, the workday doesn't end at the traditional time, and that when they get home from their day job, it's time to work their side hustle for several more hours. 

Bon Jovi's 1986 smash hit "Livin' on a Prayer" not only made it to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 at the time, but it has since attained the No. 1 spot on VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of the '80s," and No. 457 on Rolling Stone's 2024 update of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

The tune isn't necessarily one that immediately springs to mind when you think of songs about work, as, on the surface, it seems more like a rock 'n' roll love song about Tommy and Gina. But the lyrics offer a far more detailed look at the realities of working life than any of the others on this list. It mentions unions and strikes and service jobs, and reflects on the painful realities when paychecks aren't covering expenses, including having to pawn precious possessions. It's one of the songs from the '80s that nail the meaning of life.

In 2020, Desmond Child explained that while the guys writing the tune together might have been rock stars by that point, they were writing about what they knew: "The story of that song had our three stories woven through it," Child said on a 2020 episode of the "Song Chronicles" podcast. "Jon Bon Jovi — working-class kid, tryin' to do good, you know, with his six-string in hock. And that was so his story. And Richie [Sambora] too." And while Bon Jovi didn't like the song much at first, he was proven wrong when it resonated with millions of people for decades to come.