> I'm going to give the progressive movements of the turn of the 19th/20th century a lot of credit for antitrust and worker-protection laws. I'm also going to ignore anyone whose response is to try to nitpick and split out individual acts and try to attribute them to completely contextless utterly independent forces that had nothing whatsoever to do with anything else happening at the time in any way.

Nobody's saying that these were "utterly independent forces". I'm pointing out that the relationship between them was the exact opposite of what you claimed. Labor unions opposed antitrust laws which outlawed the sorts of behavior OP described; they certainly weren't responsible for it like you tried to claim.

It sounds like you're interested in ignoring the actual details of the history which disprove your point, in order to paint a certain narrative. In that case, there's probably not much point in discussing further, because that's not what a good-faith discussion looks like.