Skill-upgrading and service expansion are two trends that have characterised labour markets for a long time. What this entails for job quality over the long term is not well understood. This study considers the development of job quality in Sweden between 1968 and 2010. It explores how changes in job quality relate to the occupational structure, compared to within-job changes. Using data from the Level-of-Living-survey a measure of job quality including job complexity, physical work environment, stress and flexibility is constructed. The development is estimated over time and by gender. Regression methods are employed to examine how changes relate to the job distribution. Results show that average job quality has improved for both genders, while variation has decreased. A majority of the increase for women can be explained by changes in the job distribution, while the opposite is true for men.

The study bridges the two fields of job quality and intragenerational mobility by introducing longitudinal individual career trajectories and exploring group differentials in non-monetary job quality (including job complexity, stress, work intensity and flexibility), compared to wages and prestige, using random and fixed effect growth curve models. Analyses are based on Swedish Level-of-Living Survey panel data (1968-2021), including 4,750 respondents and 12,865 observations. Results show that cohorts successively gained better average job quality over the career. There was a large and persistent gap in job quality based on individuals' education that was not alleviated by career mobility.  The association was slightly polarized over the career for men.  A gender gap emerged over the career, where men gained a slight advantage with increasing experience.  The career structures are relatively similar for wage, prestige and job quality. Analyses show that much of the variation in job quality is located within occupations, demonstrating the importance of using individual-level measures for capturing job quality. Disparities in job quality have far-reaching consequences for well-being throughout the working life, but have not grown over time. The evolution has been positive, with rising average levels, without a corresponding rise in inequality.

Over the last decades, the class structure has undergone significant change, yet our understanding of how this relates to the quality of jobs and well-being remains limited. I study the development of four job quality dimensions: autonomy, physical environment, work intensity, and work time quality to assess their change, and how class variation is structured over time and between countries, compared to income. Following eight occupational classes in 15 European countries from 1995 to 2015, using the European Working Conditions survey. While most of the variation was within classes, there were clear class gradients in physical environment and autonomy. There was minimal variation by year (less than 1%) and country (2.6%); while class explained considerably more for all outcomes, except work intensity. Regional patterns of inequality were evident: Nordic countries (especially Denmark) and the Netherlands had lower between- and within-class inequality. Lower-skill classes consistently had greater variation in working conditions, which largely drove regional differences. Class is important for understanding job quality, especially compared to the other dimensions included here. We need to broaden our explanations, however, to better understand inequality in job quality.