Employers justified paying Irish workers less through a racial hierarchy.

Evidence

Still Thompson’s explanation for the need to complement the English working classes was not the rationale that prevailed at the time. 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: Connects to ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ and general racial-hierarchy-as-economic-rationale themes; also to the reader’s broader interest in how racial logics are constructed. — connects to: Southern employers preferred expendable Irish to valuable slaves purely economically — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 387
• SEED: Angle for an essay on how ‘racial’ wage disparities were narrated as rational economic outcomes rather than prejudice.