Patrick Walls
Open-knowledge reference entry
Patrick Walls (1847 – 24 October 1932) was an Irish trade unionist.
Walls was born to a Catholic family in the northern part of Ireland during the worst of the Great Famine. He emigrated to Tyneside to work as a labourer, then moved to Middlesbrough, where he worked at Bell's Foundry as a blastfurnaceman for seventeen years. While there, he became active in the Associated Union of Iron Workers, and in 1878 supported the split which formed the Cleveland Blastfurnacemen's Association, serving as its president. In 1887, Walls was president of Middlesbrough Trades Council.
In 1887, William Snow, secretary of the blastfurnacemen's union in Cumberland, was incapacitated through illness, and Walls travelled to Workington in an attempt to resolve a dispute there. Following a fall in the price of iron, local employers had cut wages. Walls believed that the price of iron would quickly recover, and recommended that trade unionists accept a deal where they would receive a 5% reduction in pay if it did not recover, but no reduction if it did. As he hoped, the price rebounded within a week, and wages were restored to their earlier level. Following this success, the Cumberland blastfurnacemen joined with those of Cleveland to form a new National Union of Blastfurnacemen, and Walls led negotiations which agreed an eight-hour working day in 1890.
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This entry incorporates text from “Patrick Walls” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.