Most social movements that I've read about are against governments and their actions, but is there any historical precedent for movements against private industry?
There was a significant movement in Britain against the opium trade during the 19th century. It started out as Tory opposition to a war (the First Opium War) launched by the ruling Whig government. Gladstone in particular was resolutely against the trade in opium, and spoke these words in Parliament against the First War:
I am not competent to judge how long this war will last, or how protracted may be its operations, but this I can say, that a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of.
The public outcry mainly took a religious form, as launching a war to protect drug dealers was seen as going against Christian values. That's not to say that there was necessarily a lot of sympathy for Chinese opium addicts, as they were often characterised as racially/morally (these were basically overlapping categories at this time) helpless against the drug, incapable of controlling themselves. Moreover, the trade in opium was illegal under the Qing, and so the illegally of the affair became part of the controversy.
In response to this, the big opium dealers spent a great deal of money trying to change public opinion. They had two main lines of attack. Firstly, they emphasised the aforementioned supposed racial inferiority of the Chinese that made them weak-willed and self-indulgent. Secondly, they stressed the principles of free trade. The argument went that opium dealers cannot be blamed for their customers' inability to restrain themselves, and the attacks on British ships — which turned out not to be British after all — in Canton by the Qing military was an unacceptable affront to the British right to trade freely. The trade in opium had begun to rebalance a trade deficit in the Qing Empire's favour, which was mainly caused by the British addiction to tea — which was extremely expensive — and the Qing monopoly on it's production.
During both Opium Wars, the opium lobby, allied with missionaries eager to gain access to the interior of China beyond the treaty ports, fuelled the fires of patriotism and racism. But the wars were still unpopular. In 1856, the inhabitants of Manchester wrote a letter to Queen Victoria expressing their "feelings of shame and indignation" about the war. Sections of the press continued to attack the war and its cause.
In 1857 the British Navy bombarded Canton. This caused opposition in Parliament. The war was put to a vote, which the government promptly lost. This caused a snap election (known at the time as the 'Chinese election') where the opium lobby went into overdrive. Lord Palmerston had a letter published in a newspaper, the first British Prime Minister to do so, to argue in favour of the war. The PR campaign made much of the evil ways of the Chinese, and can be seen as one of the major forces in the creation of the racist Yellow Peril narrative. The government won in a landslide, and the war was continued. During the war, Lord Elgin — son of the famous Elgin of Greek marbles fame — ordered the destruction of the Summer Palaces, which became a powerful symbol of suffering in Chinese nationalism. The Summer Palace remains a ruin, and is a tourist attraction. Opium production and consumption in China increased massively, which ironically lead to the drug being associated with Christian missionaries there, many of whom had supported the war. Back in Britain, the fact that the British had forced its trade at gunpoint conveniently forgotten, opium ironically became associated with the racially inferior Asiatic indulgence of the Chinese. When Chinese characters featured in popular fiction, they were almost always associated with opium. Due to their connections to the trade back home, Chinese immigrants often dealt in opium, and the PR became true.
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