Switzerland Today
Hello from Bern,
A day after new travel rules made it more difficult to enter Switzerland, at least for non-vaccinated, Washington has said that from November it will be easier for – vaccinated – Swiss to enter the US. Can you still keep up?
In the news: travel agencies and airlines are happy about the new US rules, while organ donation overhaul takes another step forward in the Swiss parliament.
- Swiss travel operators made happy noises on Tuesday after the US said it would open its borders to vaccinated Europeans from November. Having been shut out of America for 18 months, travel and booking agencies said they had already noted an uptick in demand. Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS), who says the US is their most important traffic region, saw a “significant increase in booking momentum” after the announcement. Climate organisations were not asked their opinion.
- The Swiss parliament has agreed a reform to make the principle of organ donation one of presumed rather than explicit consent. The current law means a person is only a donor after death if they made it clear during their lifetime; under the proposed system, organs could be removed from a deceased person unless they previously objected. Most countries in Europe already operate under presumed consent. The issue will go to a nationwide vote at a later date.
- Eight Swiss citizens are still registered as being in Afghanistan, Le Temps writes (print edition). Four want to leave, while four want to stay. The embassy in Islamabad in Pakistan is in close contact with them, the foreign ministry says. The ministry also said last week that eight non-Swiss who have a permit to come to Switzerland still want to leave Afghanistan. Some 300 Afghans with links to Switzerland were evacuated at the end of August, following the Taliban takeover.
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Dignity for the downtrodden, justice for the tech giants! Campaigners take another stab at universal basic income.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again (or fail again). In the Swiss direct democracy system, the adage doesn’t usually hold: when people’s initiatives fail at the ballot box, and especially if they fail badly, that’s often it – the idea is buried.
Not so for the chestnut of universal basic income (UBI): today, five years after voters comprehensively dumped a proposal to give a no-strings monthly income of CHF2,500 to each citizen (77% voted against it), a new campaign was launched in Bern. In 2021, campaigners reckon the time is ripe: the pandemic and the inequalities it revealed – especially in areas like domestic and care work – mean we should finally take a “responsible approach to people and nature”.
The campaigners hope to convince voters by explaining better this time how such a system would be financed: not only would the payment build on the existing web of social welfare and tax intakes, they say, but it would also involve a more aggressive taxation of tech giants like Google and Apple. In this sense the idea, in a roundabout way, jumps on the back of various calls to clamp down on our digital overlords (e.g. this op-ed in Le Temps todayExternal link saying tech giants are a threat to democratic nation-states).
It also echoes the general direction of the so-called “99% initiative” vote this weekend, which wants to clamp down on the richest 1% and redistribute capital earnings. It’s perhaps even similar – at least in terms of idealism – to another initiative collecting signatures right now, the “microtax”, which wants to revamp the Swiss taxation system by focussing on digital transactions.
But can it work? One of the paradoxes of Swiss direct democracy is that radical ideas make it onto the agenda relatively easily, through signature-collection; but once they’re there, voters have the reputation of being far from radical. The campaign will have 18 months to try to collect 100,000 signatures; the idea would then go to parliament, then to a public vote. Who knows what the public mood would be like at that stage…
Flexible, synergetic, multi-modal, collaborative, hybrid: ready for the workplace of the future?
After a long period of remote working, many offices in Switzerland are back to business as usual. There are changes: for example, some workplaces have started demanding Covid certificates for employees coming into the office – even the federal parliament, the highest workplace in the land (and the hardest working!) is thinking about this for its winter session. Other offices are slower to bring back employees, having listened to surveys showing an appetite among staff to stay home.
With all the new factors and unknowns, the phrase of the moment, as the NZZ writes todayExternal link, is “hybrid working”: some employees at home, some in the office, and a general culture and infrastructure that allows for such a mix. In particular, the paper says – quoting various experts in human resources and psychology – “seating opportunities”, “webcams”, “touch-screens”, “colour concepts”, “analogue whiteboards”, “digital whiteboards”, and much, much more, need to be tailored to make this new normal (?) optimal.
Here at SWI swissinfo.ch, such a hybrid/flexible environment (an uncannily similar set-up to that described by the NZZ in fact) has just been introduced; sometimes we work from home, attending meetings digitally; sometimes from the office, where nobody has a fixed desk, everything is flexible, and everything is moving. What is the experience so far? Quite positive: you never know which colleague you’ll meet (in person) each day; you never know where you’re going to sit; generally things are predictably unpredictable, a decent change after the unpredictable unpredictability of Covid.
As for whether swissinfo.ch, and Switzerland is at the cutting edge of the move to the hybrid workplace of the future, this is less clear: as a colleague who also uses a co-working space when he’s not in the office said recently: “This is obviously the way things are going. It’s even happening in Switzerland. But as usual, it’ll just take longer here.”
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