Workhouse paupers ate better than many employed laborers

Evidence

Moreover, when we are informed by Hobsbawm that paupers housed in the purposely punitive workhouses of the nineteenth century, though themselves victims of the applied disgust of their social and economic superiors, probably ate substantially better than significant proportions of farm-laborers and urban workers, we are chastened from the too easily presumed distinctions between employed and unemployed labor and pauperism. All three constituted an underclass that extended into the ranks of skilled workers. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 227

Categorization

• XREF: This underclass-blurring point resonates with the reader’s interest in class/identity markers treated in the ‘immodesty’ article, and with pauperism as a coercive labor instrument.