Employers justified Irish wage depression through racialized notions of Irish inferiority.

Evidence

Engels was much closer to the English manufacturing class, and perhaps more accurate in his assessment of their motives when he observed that “the Irish have … discovered the minimum of the necessities of life, and are now making the English workers acquainted with it.” For whatever it is worth, it would have been inconsistent with the tenets of Anglo-Saxonism to detach the English worker from a racial hierarchy that was quite adequate in locating the deficiencies of the Irish “race.” The Irish worker having descended from an inferior race, so his English employers believed, the cheap market value of his labor was but its most rational form. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 256

Categorization

• XREF: Prefigures how racial ideology rationalizes wage differentiation, a mechanism central to Robinsons racial capitalism thesis developed throughout the book. — connects to: The Penal Laws made Irish Catholics an oppressed race in Ireland. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 127