A small group is not "mass unemployment" -- that's the point.

> In a British textile industry that employed a million people, the [Luddite] movement’s numbers never rose above a couple of thousand.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/rage-against-the-machine

The "never rose above a couple of thousand" small group refers to the number of activist Luddites. It doesn't refer to the people working in the textile industry in general - which was a big group, and which was heavily affected.