Switzerland Today

Greetings from Bern,

Here are the latest news and stories from Switzerland on Tuesday.

Keystone / Giancarlo Cattaneo

In the News: Measures to deal with the latest Covid-19 variant are already having a negative impact on hotel bookings in Switzerland.

• Some hotels that rely in particular on visitors from Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium had seen cancellation rates of 100%, according to umbrella association Hotelleriesuisse. There have also been “massive cancellations” of company events and Christmas parties.
• Iréne Kälin is the so-called highest Swiss for 2022. Kälin, the “enfant terrible of the feminists”, as newspaper Le Matin described her, has been elected by parliament to be the speaker of the House of Representatives. She made headlines in 2018 when she breastfed her three-month-old son in parliament. Thomas Hefti will be speaker of the Senate.
• Switzerland has a new platform for reporting racist hate speech on the internet. The pilot project offers the public, professionals and organisations “the possibility to report racist content they have seen on the internet with just a few clicks”, the Federal Commission against Racism said today.

swissinfo.ch

Do we need a pandemic treaty? Covid-19 has dominated our lives for almost two years. Vaccines have been developed in record time, yet nearly half the world’s population has not received a single dose. What’s gone wrong?

In the latest edition of the Inside Geneva podcast, Imogen Foulkes is joined by global health and policy experts. Given that the new Omicron variant now threatens to undo earlier progress, they discuss whether we need a global pandemic treaty.

Copyright: Christian Egger

Last year 2.766 million people – 38% of Switzerland’s permanent resident population aged 15 and over – had a migration background. Of these, 80% were born abroad.

Whereas 7% of these people were unemployed, the rate was only 3% for those without such a background, the Federal Statistical Office revealed today.

People with a migration background are less likely to have their own business, but once they have found a job, their chances of advancement seem reasonably intact: the proportion of employees with managerial functions is only slightly lower than for people without a migration background.

However, first-generation workers with a migration background are significantly more likely to be overqualified than those without this background: 19% of foreign-born workers with a tertiary education work in jobs for which this education is not necessary. This is the case for only 12% of the workforce without a migration background. Among both groups, women are more often overqualified than men.