Swiss perspectives in 10 languages

Wage inequality within companies remains high, according to union

Boardroom
Last year, top managers received on average 139 times more pay than the employees with the lowest wages in the same company Keystone / Regina Kuehne

Last year, top managers in Switzerland received on average 139 times more pay than the employees with the lowest wages in the same company. This is the result of a study conducted by the Unia trade union and published on Wednesday.

There is no “acceptable explanation” for why companies would not use “a small part” of their profits to pay “at least halfway” decent wages, Vania Alleva, president of the union, was quoted as saying in a statement. Instead, employees’ real wages have fallen while company profits have risen, she said.

+ Salaries in Switzerland

The union is calling for general wage increases, good collective agreements and decent minimum wages, it said on Wednesday.

For the study, the trade union Unia examined 37 companies, including 34 listed ones. According to the study, the wage gap in 2022 of 1:139 is slightly lower than in the previous year, when it was 1:144.

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate them into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch

External Content
Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
Almost finished… We need to confirm your email address. To complete the subscription process, please click the link in the email we just sent you.
Daily news

Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox.

Daily

The SBC Privacy Policy provides additional information on how your data is processed.

Popular Stories

Most Discussed

News

films

More

Swiss films made their mark abroad in 2024

This content was published on Several Swiss films exceeded the 100,000 admissions mark worldwide in 2024 and received widespread praise at international film festivals.

Read more: Swiss films made their mark abroad in 2024

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative

You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!

If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR