A new study in Sweden suggests that shifting from insecure conditions to secure working conditions can reduce the risk of premature death by 20%.

The research from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, indicates that job security in the Swedish labour market needs to improve.

Researchers from the Karolinska Institutet defined precarious employment as a term used to describe jobs with short contracts, low wages, and a lack of influence and rights. In the study, published in The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Reports, the researchers examined how precarious employment affects the risk of death.

The researchers used registry data from over 250,000 workers in Sweden between the ages of 20 and 55 gathered over a period from 2005 to 2017. The study included people who worked under insecure working conditions and who then shifted to secure working conditions.

Those who switched from precarious to secure employment had a 20% lower risk of death, regardless of what happened afterward, than those who remained in precarious employment. If they remained in secure employment for 12 years, the risk of death decreased by 30%.

“Using this large population database allowed us to take account of many factors that could influence mortality, such as age, other diseases that workers can suffer from or life changes like divorce,” said Nuria Matilla-Santander, assistant professor at the institute and the study’s first author. “Because of the methods we used, we can be relatively certain that the difference in mortality is due to the precariousness of employment rather than individual factors.”

“The results are important since they show that the elevated mortality rate observed in workers can be avoided. If we reduce precariousness in the labour market, we can avoid premature deaths in Sweden,” Matilla-Santander said.

Matilla-Santander says that the next stage of the research is to examine the specific causes of mortality in this regard.

“This is the first study to show that changing from precarious employment to secure employment can reduce the risk of death,” said the paper’s last author Theo Bodin, assistant professor at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institute. “It’s the same as saying that the risk of early death is higher if one keeps working in jobs without a secure employment contract.”