Switzerland’s labor Unions Must Become More Transparent

Even the moderate Swiss think that labor unions are too powerful and their financing/spending of money is too intransparent!

"By European standards, Switzerland’s trade unions are a pretty mild bunch. Germany’s train drivers are threatening (yet another) strike; Italy’s trade unionists are almost permanently grumpy; and the less said about France’s often disgruntled leftist unions the better. ...

Against a background of mounting transparency, disclosure about party financing and spiraling corporate reporting standards, union financing remains murky.

The opacity is all the more striking given unions’ ever louder voice in recent critical political decisions. Concerns among organized labor about greater risks of wage dumping was central to the collapse of Switzerland’s years long talks with the European Union about a new Framework Treaty on bilateral relations. And the unions have been similarly inflexible on any further liberalization of the domestic labor market. ...

“The annual report of Travail Suisse (another employees’ umbrella body) is richly illustrated, but reveals no information about financial flows. Meanwhile, the ever more radical Unia (Switzerland’s biggest trade union) discloses fat income of CHF 143 million for 2019, but leaves the reader in the dark about any details of its sources of income” ...

The opacity of union accounting is all the more striking given the fact that some proportion of their funds derives, directly or indirectly, from the public sector, i.e. from tax payers. The concept of “social partnership” comprising unions, government and private business – popular in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, but relatively unfamiliar in the English speaking world – involves, among other things, setting minimum wage and working condition agreements for different sectors of the economy. ..."

Switzerland’s Unions Must Become More Transparent | Avenir Suisse Increasing politicization means era of opacity must end