Low-wage jobs in the Swedish labor market 2005-2020. Which are the low-wage jobs, where are they, and what explains their development?

The purpose of the project is to investigate and explain the development of low-paid jobs in Sweden during the period 2005-2020 - are their share of the labour market growing or reducing?

Furthermore, we will investigate who works in them, where they are geographically located and study mobility to and from low-wage jobs – are they stepping stones to better jobs?

Great emphasis will be placed on trying different definitions of low-wage jobs to see which ones are most suited to the Swedish context.

Previous research has been based on the average full-time salary of the occupations in the high and low-paid occupations.

As Sweden has a relatively compressed wage structure and that a significant proportion of the workforce works part-time and on temporary contracts, it is of interest to examine low-wage positions on the basis of the total wage income.Theoretically, we will apply a power resource perspective to our research questions and test whether changes in the size of the trade unions, unemployment level, institutional changes and changes in the labor force´s human capital can explain the development of low-wage jobs in Sweden.Furthermore, the study will compare the development of the labor market in two different crises during the time period - the Financial and the Corona crisis.

The study is based on data from LFS and register data from LISA and includes time series, sequence analyzes and semi-experimental methods (discontinuity regressions). The project will result in four scientific articles published in Swedish and English.