Ethno-religious identities and persisting penalties in the UK labor market

•Categorising individuals by their self-assessed ethnicity and their religious affiliation has enhanced our appreciation of the extent of labour market penalties experienced by minority groups in the United Kingdom.•Muslims experience the greatest penalties with regard to avoiding unemployment – especially Muslim women.•These penalties were larger when the focus turned to whether those who are employed have a job in a salariat occupation.•Members of the Jewish White-British were more advantaged than any other group including their Christian White-British comparators.

Most studies of minority group penalties in the UK labor market have focused on groups classified by their self-assessed ethnicity only, without taking into account major divisions within such groups, notably by religion. Using a large sample taken from the quarterly Labor Force Survey, this paper analyze levels of both unemployment and obtaining posts within the salariat for fourteen separate ethno-religious groups. Estimates of both gross and net penalties are derived, the latter taking the individuals’ human capital resources into account. They show that most non-White groups face an employment penalty, but Muslim groups – both men and women – experienced the greatest penalties. These penalties are exacerbated when searching for any job turns into searching for a managerial or a professional job suggesting that inequality is preserved through mechanisms of color and cultural racism which intensifies as minority workers seek jobs at the more lucrative end of the labor market – which, if persistent, could have long-term implications for the cohesion of the UK's multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society.