Hardly any violations of minimum wage regulations in Ticino

Hardly any violations of minimum wage regulations in Ticino Keystone-SDA

A good 3% of companies inspected have violated the minimum wage in the Swiss canton of Ticino in the past three years, according to an official review. The new uniform regulations for internships introduced with the minimum wage have also proved their worth.

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According to the report, almost 13,000 companies with over 65,000 employees were audited in the first three years following the introduction of the cantonal minimum wage. During this introductory phase, the infringement rate was 3.5%, the Ticino Department of Economy and Finance said on Tuesday.

In addition, guidelines for internships, which were included as an annex to the minimum wage ordinance, proved to be an effective instrument for uniformly regulating the status of interns. Here too, checks during the first three years following the introduction of the guidelines revealed no significant abuses, it added.

+ Minimum wage narrowly rejected in canton Basel Country

Violations of standard employment contracts

Checks in the area of standard employment contracts, on the other hand, revealed an infringement rate of 8.1%, according to the press release. Of the 1,200 companies inspected, 178 violated the standard employment contracts, which affected 2571 employees.

Both the violations of the minimum wage introduced on December 1, 2021, and those of the standard employment contracts were due to accounting errors, misinterpretation of job categories or a lack of adjustment to inflation, according to the statement. In both cases, the employers adjusted the wages promptly in most cases.

On Sunday, both canton Basel Country and canton Solothurn rejected minimum wage initiatives. This means that Basel City remains the only German-speaking Swiss canton with a statutory minimum wage.

In the rest of the country, cantons Geneva, Neuchâtel, Ticino and Jura have a minimum wage.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

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