Worth noting that a major factor in lowering the tempo from the Battle Blair Mountain (first confirmed use of airplane-dropped bombs and chemical weapons on Ame

Worth noting that a major factor in lowering the tempo from the Battle Blair Mountain (first confirmed use of airplane-dropped bombs and chemical weapons on American soil) to your average strike at a Starbucks is the huge concessions wrung out of the capital holding class. The Battle of Blair Mountain was precipitated by the forced evictions of miners' families from company towns, over the miners' attempts to unionize. Its hard to fathom now, but imagine that the only job available was to work in a mine, the only way to do so was to live in a company town, you worked completely at will and could be fired at any time, and your family had minutes to vacate the house the company rented to you, if you got fired (and you still owed any debt you'd racked up at the company store, which was your only source for food and supplies). There are all kinds of horrendous allegations leveled against the mine operators because of the extreme leverage they had over their workers (its not clear if it ever actually happened, but the allegation of forced prostitution of miners' wives to cover the "debts" incurred when their husbands failed to meet quota because of injury or mine collapse are pretty common). Its not clear if those allegations are true, if so, indicative of a systemic issue or just the natural consequence of putting in power people with a natural penchant for imperiousness and brutality. The coal wars are as close to a second civil war as the US has ever gotten since the first one. When you consider the working conditions the workers were trying to fix, its not difficult to say that those workers were as close to being legal slaves as it was possible to be after the first civil war without being prisoners. Of course, some mines did use prison labor, which is explicitly slavery. To further complicate that comparison most labor unions of the time explicitly barred black members, so many strikebreakers were black, and the mine operators sought them out for that reason. Coal mining remains, to this day, one of the most dangerous jobs you can work, with horrendous impacts on the workers' health long-term, provided you survive long enough to retire. It was so much worse in the past that miners fought actual battles, with machine guns and artillery, just for the seemingly basic rights they have today.