In the present study, the researchers have examined how this affects the risk of death.

“This is the first study to show that changing from precarious employment to secure employment can reduce the risk of death,” says the paper’s last author Theo Bodin, assistant professor at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet. “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.”

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 percent 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 percent.