Switzerland Today
Friday’s update from Bern: anti-climax after the end of the work-from-home rule, and a series of Swiss winter films to mark the start of the Olympics.
In the news: Switzerland to join EU migration council, Swiss torture rapporteur to leave UN, and Swissport hit by cyber-attack.
- Switzerland is likely to participate in a new “Schengen Council” proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron, whose goal is to better coordinate migration policy in Europe. Macron wants the council to facilitate quicker reaction to crises at the EU’s external borders. In Switzerland, a national vote in May will decide on whether or not to boost funding for Frontex, the body which coordinates the policing of Schengen’s external borders.
- Swiss man Nils Melzer, who has been the UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture since 2016, will step down in March, six months earlier than planned. He’s heading to a new job at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Melzer was a prominent public figure during his time at the UN, publicly questioning and criticising how authorities have handled cases including Julian Assange, the Zurich prisoner “Brian K”, and coronavirus protest movements.
- Airport services operator Swissport was hit by a ransomware attackExternal link that disrupted some operations. The attack began early on Thursday and affected a limited part of Swissport’s IT infrastructure, it said in a statement, adding that security teams had detected the attack promptly so that the impact was “largely mitigated”. On Thursday 22 flights were delayed by up to 20 minutes at Zurich airport. It’s the latest in a list of public and private organisations in Switzerland to fall victim to cyber-attacks.
Home office goes from rule to recommendation, but nothing changes, yet
After two years dreaming of getting “back to normal”, the government announced this week that things are about to get back to normal. But do we want to get back to normal? Of course not! We just want to complain, at least about the work from home rule, which was scrapped yesterday. “Home is heaven, the office is hell,” writes one columnistExternal link today, unhappy about having to shave and meet his colleagues again. 20 Minuten features a woman “depressed” about leaving her kids and her home comforts, and a man who claims (without proof) to be “much more productive” at home. “Workations” (working from a holiday location) are also apparently boomingExternal link.
Anecdotal accounts and traffic statsExternal link from Zurich indeed suggest there hasn’t been a mass repopulation of Swiss offices this week. Granted, a full return to normal was hardly to be expected overnight. But will they ever come back? Business expert Blaise Matthey tells the Tribune de Genève that the workplace has been “transformed”, and the only thing now is to find the best balance between home and office (he suggests two days at home per week for a 100% position). This seems to chime with studies of Swiss office workers, half of whom said last year they were in favour of some sort of hybrid work system. Big firms like UBS, Novartis and Swisscom are all looking at keeping “flexi” models going in the future, the AWP agency wrote today.
For now, the fact that home office is still officially “recommended” by the government gives many employees and employers an excuse not to go back to normal. Let’s see what happens later this month when/if the government lifts the recommendation too.
Swiss National Bank: high-profile loser from the Facebook downturn
A big investor hit by the fall in Meta shares this week was the Swiss National Bank (SNB), the Tages-Anzeiger reportsExternal link. A crash after Facebook published bad user results led to Meta stock losing a quarter of its value, and to virtual losses of $800 million (CHF739 million) for the SNB. The bank, which also invests heavily in currency markets, holds Meta shares to the tune of $3.22 billion, the paper writes. It has even bigger stakes in other tech giants, including over $9 billion in Apple. As for whether this latest dip will impact long-term fortunes, that’s not clear. The bank’s profits last year came to an estimated $28 billion.
Swiss winter films and documentaries, available for streaming around in the world
The Winter Olympics in Beijing opened today. To mark this, SWI swissinfo.ch has chosen four films showing various facets of Swiss winter sports, and curated them here. The films were selected from the range offered by the streaming platform Play Suisse (run by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation), they are subtitled in English, and they can also be streamed from outside Switzerland. There is a documentary about the life of Swiss skier Bernhard Russi, another about of the classic Lauberhorn downhill ski race in canton Bern, a profile of biathlete Selina Gasparin, and a look into the annual amateur giant slalom race run by the Evionnaz ski club in canton Valais.
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