Swiss union criticizes ‘insufficient’ wage increases

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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