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. ( )

A vivid, engaging chronicle of the American labor movement from its beginnings through the end of the 20th century. ( )

Last month, the legislature of the state of Michigan forced through a 'Right to Work' legislation, severely limiting the power and influence of labor unions in the United States. After Wisconsin's enforcement of RtW laws, the Michigan symbolic importance, as Michigan's automotive industry has been a center of labor for the past 80 years, and after the assaults of the Tea Party and corporate media, the future of unions was in doubt.

This volume is a broad survey of the history of unions in the United States. It starts with the very beginnings of industrialization in the 1830s and continues to almost the present day. The first recorded strike in the United States was that of women workers for textile corporations in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Labor demands and strikes became more intense during the post-Civil War period. A swarm of strikes in the 1870s, the 'vertical organization' of unions across industries, tough court battles against corruption, counterattacks, bombings, scab labor, and the foundation of the IWW in 1905.

There is a broad organizational survey of national unions, as well as biographical sketches of major agitators, union leaders, and intellectual supporters.

The FDR administration was a period of the greatest government support for labor. Although strikes did not stop against poor working conditions (see The Battle of the Overpass), government was instead much more accommodating to their demands.

In the 1950s, they were largely investigated for corruption and misuse of funds.

In the 1960s and later, some more unions became more closely tied to social justice and civil rights movements. This was one of the greater flaws in union history, that they had not taken advantage of this possibility earlier. In these past two decades, we see the kaleidoscope of labor's potential and its pitfalls - Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King on one hand, Teamster thugs on the other.

After a political schism over the Vietnam War, the unions were largely shunned by the Reagan administration, and following neoliberal policies have proven to be extremely damaging not only to them, but the livelihoods of lower classes as a whole over the next 30 years. The future of organized labor must be more global, intersectional, in order to have any chance of combating the reach and power of MNCs. ( )