It can be an annoyance - when looking for a job in Switzerland, seeing a role you love - but under salary, it is only listed as “competitive”. However, this may soon change: a number of major domestic businesses and Swiss international companies have said they will start to routinely list salaries on job adverts. The measure, recently introduced by law in California, is said to make job applications fairer and more transparent.
According to 20 minuten, a number of large companies listed on the Swiss Stock Exchange are starting to test whether showing a salary range on job advertisements makes wages fairer for workers. The newspaper noted that several large companies, like internet providers and the postal service, have said they will carry out test phases in the near future.
Swisscom, for example, said that it would be adding salary ranges to a number of job adverts in the near future, something it already does for its roles in Latvia and the Netherlands. Swiss Post confirmed that it would be running a pilot project in Graubünden, and the pharmaceutical giants of Basel, Roche and Novartis announced that they would be adhering to the concept for all jobs in the United States, but would not do the same in Switzerland yet.
The debate in Switzerland stems from a new law that was recently adopted in the state of California in the US. From next year, companies in the state that employ more than 15 people must show a salary range on all job advertisements. According to CNBC, the move will affect around 200.000 companies, including Swiss firms like Roche and Logitech, and is designed to fight against wage discrimination according to sex, age and race.
It is hoped that by making wages more transparent, it will make it harder for companies to discriminate against certain groups - a study from Eurostat found that, on average, women in Switzerland earned 43,2 percent less salary than men in 2018. Supporters of the law in California cited a study from 2019 which found that when wage transparency laws were applied, wage inequality decreased by 7 percent.