Industrial Change and the Progress of Labor in the English Cotton Industry

Abstract

By the time labor unrest in the Lancashire cotton industry had taken the form of the strike, trade-union development was being hindered by the Combination Laws of 1799–1800, which were to outlaw unions of workers (and supposedly employers) until their repeal in 1824–25. Although the cotton operatives resorted to the strike weapon during this period, the movements were indeed dismal failures. While the Lancashire handloom weavers seem to have won partial concessions from their employers in 1808, the raises were only temporary, and the weavers remained in their state of almost habitual poverty until being extinguished as a class of workmen by the power-loom. And the spinners, whose unions were noted for their superior organization, failed entirely in their strikes of 1810 and 1818. Given this set of circumstances, labor historians Sidney and Beatrice Webb have stressed the “ephemeral combinations” of the early cotton workers and their “passionate struggles to maintain a bare subsistence wage”, alternating with “intervals of abject submission”. Similarly, G. D. H. Cole has depicted the textile workers, along with the miners, as “latecomers to trade unionism”.