The market can de-competitiveize itself through non-compete agreements, intellectual property laws, and other barriers to entry. The competitiveness occurs around the "ruleset", which shifts around according to the regulatory environment.
The government tends to default to supporting strikebreaking(and still generally does in any era, including this one) because industrialists, financiers and politicians share lines of mutual support: legal ownership of intangibles like a corporation acts as an alternative to feudal fiefdoms and warlords, in that it's less destructive and lets complex processes evolve.
Corporations are very effective at putting taxable assets on the books, which allows a more complex state bureaucracy, so politicians end up wanting the support of business for government power and expenditures. Financiers want their thumb on the scale, for the winners they picked to continue winning, rather than to run off and form a competitor. And the industrialists themselves, though they are often at the forefront of the most dramatic reorganizations, tend to get stuck in equilibriums where either they're the evil monopolist, or someone else is. Once you arrive at the equilibrium, the elite players lose their dynamism and are pressured to stay within the existing trends or lose their place.
Thus when the Pinkertons or their modern counterparts come in, the officials shrug and say "business as usual, business as usual". The system convulses when it becomes a riot and property is destroyed because that weakens the whole premise: less capital to deploy, fewer assets to tax, failure to return on investment. And people out of a job, but if they were rioting it may have been a crummy job. It creates a shock that can break the equilibrium and enable a different deployment of labor and capital in a new technological environment. That's essentially why the industrial era has so many short, distinct periods and upheavals within it; the sausage is being made, though it's ugly to witness.