-I once took a research colloquium with Charles Tilly (who, both by his own -work and that of the armies of grad students he's sheparded through -dissertations using his frameworks and thence into jobs, has some claim to -be the grandmaster of comparative strike analsysis), and IIRC he said that -no matter what metric they used, American labor history stood out as -outstandingly more violent than that of Europe during the formative period -of the 1890s through the 1930s.
Most folks don't know that post-Civil War and pre-Guantamo, the largest use of military tribunals were by the US military against mining strikers in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West during this period.
The level of sustained government repression and violence is so high that it seems almost inevitable that labor would turn to alternative sources of violent authority to even the odds in some industry fights.
Nathan Newman