That is the suggestion made in Deborah Cohen’s interesting review of Joshua B. Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World.

Giant factories were a feature of both the US and Soviet economies in the 1930s, which led some observers at the time to speculate that capitalism and socialism were converging toward a single economic form. But this convergence turned out to be quite temporary, as giant factories lasted much longer in the USSR:

By the late 1940s, the era of the showcase factory was over in the United States. The strength of unionization, particularly demonstrated by the formidable strike wave of 1945–1946, made clear to industrialists the danger of concentrating workers in a few plants.

More than simply a means of controlling costs or rationalizing distribution, the drive to open smaller and decentralized plants, especially in the low-wage, nonunionized South, was also a strategy to ensure that a company’s entire operation couldn’t be hamstrung by a strike.

At the same time, by contrast, industrial gigantism continued apace across the Eastern Bloc. The East Germans built the steel town of Stalinstadt (now Eisenhüttenstadt); in Poland, there rose Nowa Huta, with a workforce of nearly 30,000 by 1967. Crippling labor unrest wasn’t a problem that particularly worried leaders in the Eastern Bloc, who could count on a network of spies as well as a cadre of factory workers who were fervent believers in socialism.

The current world champion of industrial gigantism is, of course, China. The “Foxconn City” facility in Shenzhen is generally thought to be the world’s largest manufacturing facility, employing something over 200,000 workers. Strikes in China are not uncommon but tend to be short-term events related to specific disputes, rather than an organized strategy as part of collective bargaining. This of course is because China does not have independent unions; the state-controlled union tends to side with management. So the risk to a company’s operations from an individual strike is still low–though it is worth noting that Foxconn does not depend on one single large facility but instead has lots of large facilities, in China and many other countries.

The Volgograd Tractor Factory in the 1930s