Market Reality Versus Religious Morality: Empirical Evidence from the Saudi Arabian Labor Market

The paper explores Islamic morality within labor market realities. It presents Islamic moral axioms that are expected to guide employer–employee relationships. It provides an extensive review of Islamic moral ideals related to fairness in the labor market. Based on survey data from 319 individuals in the Saudi labor market, it tests three hypotheses related to religiosity, secular aspirations, and perception and practice of fairness in the labor market. Using multinomial logistic regression, the findings from several models clearly support all three hypotheses. They show that employers, owners and senior managers were more likely to consider market reality as their reference for describing fairness. Ideally speaking, the regression results confirm that being religious contributes positively to the sense of fairness even in a secular context. However, they also reveal that secular aspirations override religious ideals when it comes to market realities. In other words, when people place great importance on worldly outcomes, religious ideals have almost no impact on their labor market practices even if they ideally support fair practices. The study concludes that religious morality does matter with regard to fairness in employer–employee relationships only if it is not superseded by secular aspirations. Those who have a high-level of religiosity consider themselves to be fairer. However, if they embrace secular aspirations, they are less likely to practice their moral ideals in the labor market.