ABSTRACT
The cotton industry furnishes a natural starting point for an investigation of the growth of early workers' organisations in the Stockport district. The first small jennies had been intended for domestic use and meant that a person who formerly worked one spinning wheel could thenceforth operate a jenny and thereby increase his or her output by many times. The movement as a whole was channelled, during the first part of the ensuing year, into a parliamentary petition to restrict the size of the new machines by means of a tax. Grievances among Stockport jenny spinners appear to have been directed instead towards trade union activities. By 1785 there was a Cotton Spinners Friendly Society which had a committee and a strike fund. The decline in jenny spinning in the dozen years after 1818 corresponded with the beginning of a new stage in the development of combinations among mule spinners and certain other factory occupations.
