Employees in the healthcare, retail and catering-hospitality sectors are particularly hard hit, the umbrella organisation said on Monday.
Keystone-SDA
The Swiss union organisation Travail.Suisse has given a mixed view on 2025 wage negotiations. It says wage increases in some sectors are insufficient to offset the decline in purchasing power faced by workers.
+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
Employees in the healthcare, retail and catering-hospitality sectors are particularly hard hit, the umbrella organisation said in a press release on Monday. It estimates that a “significant” wage gap has accumulated in these sectors since 2021.
+ Swiss salaries: high, stable, yet not enough for many
This slump is not general, however. The outlook is slightly brighter for building site workers, carpenters and painters, for example. For these trades, wage negotiations have produced “satisfactory, even good” results.
+ From the archives: how CHF6,000 gets spent in Switzerland
But even if wage increases have been “extorted” from employers “within the framework of bitter negotiations”, these increases often do not serve to fully compensate for inflation, says Travail.Suisse. It cites the case of public service employees in particular.
Translated from French by DeepL/sb
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
