I wouldn’t rule out some decidedly retro coercion if it suits someone; but one potential factor is the relative accessibility of outsourced labor.
It’s harder than your friendly Accenture or Infosys consultants will tell you, especially if you want good results; but setting an offshore team to work in your data mine over the internet is relatively accessible(as it switching to a different one if the first one gets uppity) compared to importing a batch of replacements for your coal mine.
If you have a big, hard to move, piece of capital equipment(like a steel mill or something) or some natural resource you are digging up it’s either expensive or impossible to bring the work to the workers; and can be expensive to bring new workers to the work(and when you do us when you call in the Pinkertons to sweep the old ones out of the way).
If you can simply move the work anywhere with an internet connection obtaining new workers is cheaper and you don’t actually need to remove the old ones from the premises(you might choose to; but just letting Bay Area rents starve them out won’t delay your new office in Bangalore starting work, so it’s optional). This makes trying to rule this here company town with an iron fist somewhat less attractive.
There’s also the question of whether you can coerce the kind of work you need out of the people who you can’t just replace and then ignore because their picket line is only blocking access to some rented cube farm rather than anything important: if your hotshot machine learning guru is upset you probably can’t just get a replacement on rentacoder; but it’s also tricky to get them to return to work on the sort that makes them hard to replace rather than just return to punching the clock and sandbagging a bit. You’d need metrics that would be the envy if management consultants everywhere to be able to institute a “produce 16 tons of intellectual property per shift or the floggings continue” rule.
None of the above is to suggest any sort of new spirit of goodwill, or to diminish the likelihood of specific people seemed inconvenient being subject to surveillance and harassment of the sort that used to require sleazy PIs but can now encompass pretty much anything they do in contact with a Turing complete device; but there are differences in things like the mobility of capital equipment and resources that make the classic “terrorizing the company town into submission and shooting a way through the picket line for the scabs” type stuff somewhat less valuable, and so potentially not worth the cost.
