"We Work the Black Seam" is a protest song recorded by British musician Sting for his 1985 debut solo album The Dream of the Blue Turtles, on which it is the longest track.

Its lyrics express the position of the British coal miners who had been on strike during the year prior to the album's release, addressed to the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

They tell of the miners' deep attachment to their work and its importance to the country's economy and culture, alluding to William Blake's poem "And did those feet in ancient time", while criticising Thatcher's economic policies, particularly the effort to shift from coal to nuclear power as Britain's primary source of energy.

They have noted in particular how its insistent, repetitive synthesizer figure and unchanging backing percussion rhythm suggest a contrast between machinery and the humanity represented by Sting's vocal and Branford Marsalis's soprano saxophone fills.

The lyrics drew a mixed reaction; scientists have criticised the song for its inaccurate statement that carbon-14 is dangerously radioactive, when in fact it is a widespread product of natural decay that is harmless in those quantities and instead used for carbon dating.

[8] When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom following the victory of her Conservative Party in the 1979 elections, one of her goals was to add to Britain's nuclear power generating capacity.

It had led to the construction of 58 new reactors in the late 1970s, making France less dependent on foreign oil imports[9] and eliminating the use of coal, a result also achieved in neighbouring Belgium.

[10] Britain, by contrast, had pioneered the use of commercial nuclear power in the 1950s but since then had lagged behind, with its useful reactors ageing into obsolescence while newer projects like Dungeness B became national embarrassments as construction costs and delays escalated.

The electorate answered that challenge by returning the opposition Labour Party, more closely allied with the National Union of Miners (NUM), to power.

One element was that unions could not be allowed to exercise such control over the British economy as they had been, or had been perceived as doing, under governments of both parties since World War II.

The total number of miners had declined by 80 per cent from those earlier eras, many of the richer and more accessible coal seams had been depleted and only government subsidies kept mining profitable.

The government responded in 1983 by appointing Sir Ian McGregor to head the NCB following his tenure at British Steel, where he had made redundant 95,000 jobs in the course of making it profitable enough to be privatised.

On the fourth, the progression stops at D on the words "carbon fourteen", after which the bass and synthesizer play a scale descending from F to A, facilitating the return to A minor for the song's title to be sung twice before the next verse.

[22] The song fades in with a repeating six-note keyboard figure in a vibraphone-like voice in open fourths and fifths,[22] played on the downbeats,[5] that critic Jon Pareles likened to "the clang of picks".

Gable sees this as, along with the song's fading in and then out and the end, suggesting a factory in continuous production, creating tension between the humanity of the melody and the rigid backing track that accentuates the theme of the lyrics.

[4] While those notes imply he had never been able to use it, due to his inability to finish it or "find suitable lyrics", it was in fact the melody line of "Savage Beast", a song he had recorded in 1975 when part of the British jazz fusion band Last Exit.

[22] In his 2019 doctoral dissertation on Sting's music for Canada's York University, Christopher Rait finds "a number of appealing rhythmic devices" in "We Work the Black Seam", which he traces to swing influence.

In the second verse, the singer alludes to the many accidents and deaths that have occurred in mines while the miners "tunneled deep inside the nation's soul" (and, later "walk through ancient forest lands[d] / And light a thousand cities with our hands").

[24] He alludes to the maintenance difficulties Sting told the NME of having heard about from his friends, and then the government's reasons for phasing out coal in favour of nuclear energy:[25] Power was to become cheap and cleanGrimy faces were never seenBut deadly for twelve thousand yearsIs carbon fourteenThe next verse alludes to "And did those feet in ancient time", an early 19th-century poem by William Blake that a young Sting would likely have studied in grammar school, later adapted into the Anglican hymn, "Jerusalem", in describing the nuclear plants as "dark satanic mills [that] have made redundant all our mining skills".

[24] "We Work the Black Seam" was one of the last tracks on the album to be recorded at Eddy Grant's Blue Wave Studios in Barbados before those sessions concluded in March 1985.

Afterwards he took the master tapes to New York to share with executives at A&M Records, his label, and then went to Le Studio, in Morin-Heights, Quebec, Canada, north of Montreal, to mix the album.

[28][29] In late 1985, Sting and the jazz musicians he had recorded The Dream of the Blue Turtles with gathered in Paris to rehearse for a short European tour.

The scene segues into a performance of the song with the band at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy with an arrangement similar to the recorded version save for the backing vocals; saxophonist Branford Marsalis is applauded after playing the melody line as a solo.

Eight years later, in 1993, Sting re-recorded "We Work the Black Seam", with Hugh Padgham co-producing, during sessions for his album Ten Summoner's Tales.

"The sounds of delicately malletted percussion, organ and light saxophone licks lend [it] a hymnlike ethereality", wrote Stephen Holden in The New York Times.

"The arrangement also illuminates the song's deeper contemplation of power hidden in the earth and its comparisons between the irresponsible exploitation of human labor and of natural resources.

[18] The Los Angeles Times labelled the song as "an extraordinary ballad ... which builds on a minimal five-note figure and [Branford] Marsalis' atonal accents".

[7] Critics and scholars looking back on "We Work the Black Seam" in later years have seen it as a significant step in Sting's development as a writer and performer of protest music.

[24] Gable notes that "We Work the Black Seam" is Sting's first protest song built around environmentalist themes, a cause he would become more strongly associated with later in his solo career, particularly protection of the world's rainforests.