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Low-wage jobs are often regarded as dead-ends in the labour market careers of young people. Previous research focused on disentangling to what degree the association between a low-wage job at the start of working life and limited chances of transitioning to better-paid employment is causal or spurious. Less attention has been paid to the channels that may facilitate the upward wage mobility of low-wage workers. We focus on such mechanisms, and we scrutinize the impact of social ties to higher-educated co-workers. Due to knowledge spillovers, job referrals, as well as firm-level productivity gains, having higher-educated co-workers may improve an individual's chances of transitioning to a better-paid job. We use linked employer-employee data from longitudinal Swedish registers and panel data models that incorporate measures of low-wage workers' social ties to higher-educated co-workers. Our results confirm that having social ties to higher-educated co-workers increases individual chances of transitioning to better-paid employment.

This article investigates how the evolution of local labour market structure enables or constrains workers as regards escaping low-wage jobs. Drawing on the network-based approach of evolutionary economic geography, we employ a detailed individual-level panel dataset to construct skill-relatedness networks for 72 functional labour market regions in Sweden. Subsequent fixed-effect panel regressions indicate that increasing density of skill-related high-income jobs within a region is conducive to low-wage workers moving to better-paid jobs, hence facilitating labour market upgrading through diversification. While metropolitan regions offer a premium for this relationship, it also holds for smaller regions, and across various worker characteristics.

While previous studies have demonstrated the disadvantages of workers who get stuck in low-wage employment, more knowledge is needed about the institutions that facilitate getting better-paid jobs. This paper examines the role of trade unions, taking a cross-country comparative perspective. It uses data on 29 European countries from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and multilevel modelling techniques. The results suggest that stronger trade unions improve chances for upward wage mobility among low-wage workers. We also find differential effects across population subgroups, with larger benefits among better educated employees and workers in the prime-age. 

Labour market disadvantages tend to run in families: children who grow up with parents who experience job losses or receive low wages are themselves at higher risk of experiencing labour market difficulties. However, little is known about the intergenerational transmission for those who manage to escape from precariousness, and how the transmission of labour market disadvantage operates depending on the gender structure of parent-child dyads. The present study uses Swedish register data and longitudinal methods that follow a cohort of people born in 1985 (n = 72,409) and their parents across 26 years. Our findings show that children who experienced parental employment disadvantages had the most severe labour market disadvantages later in life. However, if the employment situations of their parents improved, they were somewhat more likely to follow a more stable, high-wage career path compared to children whose parents experienced more persistent forms of disadvantage, such as long-term unemployment or severe labour market instability. We also show that the mother’s labour market disadvantages were an important determinant of the future labour market career of her child, regardless of gender. This finding underscores the need to go beyond the analysis of father-son dyads in intergenerational research.

This article examines the moderating role of employee representation on the chances of receiving employer-paid training among temporary and permanent workers from a cross-country, comparative perspective. The impact of employee representation is considered at the individual level and at the country level. The statistical analyses are performed using data from the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey and multilevel modelling. Our results suggest that temporary workers receive less employer-paid training than permanent workers. Access to employee representation increases workers' access to employer-paid training, regardless of contract type. At the country level, we found that the training-related benefits from union coverage are larger for permanent than for temporary workers. Our findings suggest that employee representation in the workplace could operate as an equalizer between temporary and permanent workers; while at the country level, the lobbying effect of union coverage is more beneficial for permanent workers.