Unia: Gap between highest and lowest wages is widening
Published: Monday, Aug 26th 2024, 06:10
Updated At: Monday, Aug 26th 2024, 11:40
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Last year, Switzerland's top managers earned on average 143 times more than their employees with the lowest salaries. According to a study by the trade union Unia, the difference has increased further compared to the previous year.
In 2022, the pay gap was still 1:139, Unia wrote on Monday in the wage study, which was published during an action near the Bern office of the Swiss Employers' Association. The union found the biggest difference of 1:267 at the major bank UBS.
Its CEO Sergio Ermotti earned 14.4 million francs in nine months, or 84,000 francs per working day. According to Unia, this would have amounted to CHF 19.2 million for the year as a whole, 50 percent more than the previous UBS CEO Ralph Hamers. Ermotti thus earned 1.5 times more in one day than the lowest-paid person at UBS in a year.
CEO and shareholders earn more
Overall, the highest salaries have continued to rise: five CEOs earned more than ten million francs. Vasant Narasimhan from Novartis, for example, earned 16.2 million francs. This means that his salary has almost doubled compared to the previous year. The third-placed and outgoing CEO of Nestlé, Ulf Mark Schneider, received 11.2 million francs, almost a million more than in the previous year.
Shareholders also benefited from the profits of the largest Swiss companies. A total of CHF 45 billion in dividends was distributed to shareholders, compared to CHF 44.3 billion in the previous year. Roche and Nestlé alone paid out 8 billion each. Shareholders also benefited from share buybacks.
Low and medium wages stable
This shows that there is actually more than enough money to raise even the lowest wages, Unia continued. But these have hardly moved at all. On the contrary: due to the increased cost of living - such as health insurance premiums and rents - they have lost even more value. The same also applies to average wages adjusted for inflation.
A week ago, the employees' umbrella organization Travail Suisse had already called for significant wage increases of up to 4 percent for the coming year. Unia plans to hold a large wage demonstration in Bern on September 21. For the study, the union examined wages in the 36 largest companies in Switzerland.
The employers' association immediately criticized the study. It was deliberately based solely on the largest Swiss companies - but more than 99 percent of Swiss companies are SMEs, it wrote. It also referred to the Federal Statistical Office, which announced in March that the general wage gap had hardly changed in the economy as a whole between 2008 and 2022.
During this period, the wages of the best-paid ten percent of employees rose by 13.5 percent. Wage growth was lowest in the middle class at 11.5%. The lowest-paid ten percent of employees saw their wages rise by 14.3 percent.
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