There's Power in a Union (the title taken from a popular union folk song) is the extensively researched, exhaustively descriptive history of unions and the labor movement in the United States. While this monolithic book is no easy read, long, complicated, and full of enough organization acronyms to make your head ache (just try keeping IWW, AFL, ICO, and UAW straight, along with their founders and key players), it is worth the effort to understand just how hard the struggle was to obtain even the most basic work concessions from employers. The things we take as given today, like the 8 hour work day, the 40 hour week, minimum wage, and basic safety measures to name a few, never just evolved on their own, they each required a fight, often lengthy, sometimes fatal, to be made into law, and that history, while vitally important, is often forgotten or glossed over.