Tag Archives: 3.) Swiss Info

Opponents of e-voting have started a campaign to force a national vote on a moratorium for five years. The publicly-owned company Swiss Post, which had abandoned its electronic voting system in July over security concerns, has developed a new version. “We have already proposed a solution” to cantons, said general manager Roberto Cirillo in an interview published by the La Liberté newspaper on Friday. According to Cirillo, the company is in the process of defining the...

Some two million tonnes of food is thrown away every year in Switzerland. This year’s CHF200,000 ($204,000) J.E. Brandenberger Foundation prize has been awarded to Yvonne Kurzmeyer, founder of the charity organisation Schweizer Tafel. The organisation redistributes over 4,000 tonnes of food a year to underprivileged groups in Switzerland. Kurzmeyer was awarded the prize for her outstanding achievements in the redistribution of surplus resources to benefit those in...

Women in Switzerland earn about a fifth less than men, according to the Federal Equality Office. Large companies in Switzerland will have to analyse wages of men and women starting in 2020 and make the audited results available to staff in 2021. The Federal Council agreed on Wednesday that the equal pay revision to the Gender Equality Act, passed by parliament in December 2018, will come into force on July 1, 2020. Companies will have one year to publish a gender pay...

Satisfied men at work The vast majority of Swiss people enjoy going to work. In a survey by consultants EY, 87% said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their job. Although the figure has barely changed since last year, differences between sectors persist. In the construction industry and in mechanical and systems engineering, for example, satisfaction has increased significantly. In the banking and insurance sectors, on the other hand, it has declined,...

Switzerland need to act to ensure the safety of its drinking water supplies in future. Pollution from agriculture, former industrial sites and landfills is threatening Switzerland’s groundwater reserves, according to a detailed study of water quality. The water quality studyexternal link from the Federal Office for the Environmentexternal link (FOEN), released on Thursday, said groundwater faces the greatest pressures in areas of high farming activity. It stated that...

The culprit was a head of strategy at Roche, which is headquartered in Switzerland at the Roche tower in Basel. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has fined Lorenz Erne, a former senior executive at Swiss pharmaceutical firm Roche, for insider trading and ordered him to pay back the ill-gotten profits. Erne accepted the accusations and agreed to the terms of a settlement with the SEC, according to an SEC documentexternal link published on Thursday....

Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and a key financial hub for the world. Switzerland’s financial centre has a positive reputation abroad, despite a string of scandals in 2018, according to a 19-nation survey conducted by Presence Suisse. The reputation and quality of Swiss banks were rated as “good” to “very good” by most respondents in the international poll of 12,767 people. The ethics and responsibility of the Swiss banking sector are also well regarded....

Climate will be a big debating point for October’s parliamentary elections. (© Keystone / Peter Klaunzer) Analysis of survey questions filled out by Swiss politicians in 2015 and 2019 shows a marked turnaround in attitudes towards the introduction of a carbon tax on fuel. The Smartvote online platformexternal link asks politicians various attitudinal questions in an effort to help voters make up their minds in the lead...

At its annual press conference in January, Novartis focused on “transformative treatments” – a therapy based on the belief that illness may be caused by the subconscious influences. Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis has dismissed criticism that it allegedly withheld information about animal testing data inaccuracies to United States authorities for a human gene therapy. Novartisexternal link said its subsidiary in...

Swissmetal has a long history beginning in the second half of the 19th century. But the company came under growing pressure in the 1980s as a result of international competition. The cash-strapped Baoshida Swissmetal company has been taken over by a group of Swiss investors six years after it was sold to a Chinese group. The newly-founded Swissmetal Industries, backed by two private investors, said it had acquired the...