Contemporary approaches to study tourism’s economic impacts mainly refer to methodologies employing multipliers and intersectoral linkages. However, most tourism economic impact studies are theoretically embedded within a narrow growth-oriented framework focusing on aggregated indicators, thus, allowing little analytical room beyond the GDP-perspective. This reductionist view on tourism development systematically overlooks socio-economic dynamics as well as grievances for the tourism workforce. This is particularly critical, as it is argued that tourism is a significant driver for regional development, and that tourism systems are characterized by low entry barriers that allow a large share of the local and regional population to participate in various earning opportunities. Indeed, economic theory should aim to analyze not only what, how and how many tourism services are produced, but also being capable to solve social and distributive problems, including poverty reduction and avoidance. While unequal distribution of socio-economic benefits relates to issues of distributive justice and precarious working conditions, unequal income distributions make it increasingly difficult to sustain a decent life and pursue the desired livelihood for a growing number of tourism workers. After critically discussing major justice theories and their use in tourism, our mixed-methods study addresses distributional and (in)justice issues regarding tourism workers by extending traditional economic impact methodology. We, firstly, disaggregate income effects gained from regionalized Input-Output models to obtain income inequality measures, like Gini-indexes and Lorenz curves, for major occupations in the regional tourism sector of Jämtland-Härjedalen, Sweden. Additional qualitative data from interviews with representatives from major tourism institutions, such as the regional tourism association, labour unions, employment service, or the chamber of commerce, help us to gain an in-depth understanding on poverty issues affecting the regional tourism workforce. Results show that despite institutional framework conditions of the ‘Nordic model’, particularly occupations with little or no educational requirements are most strongly affected by issues of injustice. Our proposed approach broadens the traditional view on tourism economic impacts and helps to improve the process of tourism-induced socio-economic sustainability.