Switzerland Today
Hello from Bern,
It’s the first day of the countdown to Christmas for many here. No longer is a simple chocolate or paper-based Advent calendar enough though. Shops all over Bern have jumped on board, selling calendars with 24 days of goodies inside. Not sure how sustainable it is to have 24 sample-size lotions or mini stuffed animals, but consumers seem to love them. They aren’t all a cheap gimmick though. There are plenty of crafty folks out there bringing some cheer with their home-made calendars, as the Tages-Anzeiger reveals.
In the News: Corona cases top 10,000 and Zurich is expensive but not as pricey as Tel Aviv
- The number of people infected with the Omicron variant is increasing in Switzerland. At midday today it was three casesExternal link, but this could be more by the end of the day. The total number of new coronavirus infections exceeded 10,000 today. The last time it was this high was last November. The situation in hospitals is “a nightmareExternal link,” the chief physician at Inselspital in Bern told Swiss public television, SRF. Similar situations have been reported in Zurich hospitals.
- Parliament rejected a proposal made last week to increase the “cohesion payment” to the EU as a way to ease tensions with the bloc. The hope was that by increasing the payment, the EU would accept Swiss participation in various joint programmes, such as the Horizon research scheme, which Switzerland was frozen out of after breaking off talks on an overarching Swiss-EU framework agreement in May. Finance Minister Ueli Maurer said Switzerland would be “laughed at” in Brussels if it came with such a proposal.
- The latest Cost of Living ranking from the Economist Intelligence Unit saw Zurich drop from first (a tie with Paris and Hong Kong) to fourth. But don’t expect a cup of coffee to be any cheaper than it was last year. The results say more about countries and cities that have been heavily impacted by soaring inflation and supply chain bottlenecks from the pandemic than it does about anything getting less expensive in Switzerland. Tel Aviv was declared the most expensive city and Tehran saw the biggest jump, moving from 79th to 29th place.
We may be headed back to the home office again. Where in the world that will be is another question.
A few years ago, Swiss pharma giant Novartis announced a major restructuring, laying off around 2,000 workers in Switzerland. This was pre-pandemic, when the talk of working from home was an exception rather than the rule. Naturally, the news created a stir, especially given how many expats work for the company and rely heavily on their job to stay in the country.
Fast forward to today, the Tages-Anzeiger has reported that this wasn’t just a downsizing moveExternal link but it’s also about outsourcing some jobs to eastern European countries like Slovenia – a move that has become easier due to the home office policy in the pandemic. Today around 5,800 Novartis employees work in Slovenia – about half the number that work in Switzerland (or at least they are recorded as being based there).
This is not an isolated case, according to an interview with a digitalisation expert published in the same newspaper. He says there are two contradictory trends going on: on the one hand, companies are outsourcing jobs since people are already used to working outside the office, and on the other, there are more calls to onshore or bring jobs back to the domestic market.
We’ll have to wait to see how this all pans out. Based on the government announcement about possible new (or some old) coronavirus measures, we could be headed back to home office soon.
When news sells, it isn’t always news. But according to a study published today, only about a third of readers of online articles can spot the difference and identify “native ads”.
These are advertisements that look like journalistic content but are actually paid promotion. The study by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences found that people were mostly likely to recognise an article as sponsored if it was labelled as such at the end of the piece, or if the article talked about a subject in a “disproportionately excessive or positive” way.
One unexpected finding though is that even when people recognised it, they didn’t necessarily perceive the ads as less informative or credible than actual journalistic content. I’m not sure if that says more about the ads or the journalism though. Either way, the amount and creativity of native ads and paid content are clearly growing here in Switzerland.
Swiss Post has announced a really cheap stamp
It’s not the biggest news here in Switzerland but with Santa Claus expecting many letters in the next few weeks, some young kids will be relieved to hear that the Swiss Post will be printing CHF0.05 value stamps (equivalent of about USD 5 cents). This is because, as of 2022, the price of sending B mail will increase from CHF.85 to .90 and there is no B post stamp to make up the difference.
Swiss public television, SRF, reported that the stampsExternal link will include a picture of a CHF0.05 coin and will be available in mid-December.
For any young readers, the Swiss Post invites you to send wish lists to Santa Claus at this addressExternal link in Rovaniemi, in Finnish Lapland, which is apparently his hometown according to the Swiss Post.
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