Swiss union criticizes 'insufficient' wage increases

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. +Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox 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. + Swiss salaries: high, stable, yet not enough for many 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. + From the archives: how CHF6,000 gets spent in Switzerland But even if wage increases have been "extorted" from employers "within the framework of bitter negotiations", these increases often do not serve ...