In 1863 a small group of Glasgow trade unionists launched a campaign to promote basic reform of the Master and Servant acts. It has been argued that this campaign was initiated by Scottish rather than English workers because the Master and Servant acts operated more harshly in Scotland than in England. In England, after passage of Jervis's Act in 1848, magistrates had the option of summoning workers to proceedings rather than immediately issuing a warrant for their arrest; by the 1860s it was common for English justices to do so. Jervis's Act, however, did not apply to Scotland, and there, master and servant cases still began with the arrest of the worker. However, the story cannot have been this simple. For one thing, by this time tens of thousands of Scottish workers were no longer, as a practical matter, subject to the Master and Servant acts, working as they did under the minute contract system. Ironically, however, rather than assuage discontent with the Master and Servant acts, the minute contract system may have exacerbated it by making it clear that a world of wage work without penal sanctions was not only conceivable but practical.

It took three months of internal debate for the Glasgow unionists to arrive at a set of demands. Finally, the group agreed that three basic changes were necessary. First, all cases should be tried in the County Courts in England and before the sheriffs in Scotland rather than before local magistrates, whose membership was drawn so heavily from the employing classes.