Playing Offense and Defense

Having to win a majority vote — but simultaneously defeat the Liberals’ bid to raise the retirement age — the union movement needed to strategize. While the Liberals’ reactionary proposal was certainly dangerous, its polling support was dismal. Partly for this reason, the unions decided to focus their campaign on winning the vote for their own call for an additional pension payment.

Essentially embracing a language of “commonsense solidarity” and economic populism, the unions largely framed the question as a universal good. Generally declining to overemphasize specific demographic groups or identities, their rhetoric focused on showing how almost everybody would gain from their proposal — except the rich.

The massive potential of such an approach was not lost on observers, even those not necessarily sympathetic to the Left. As political scientist Michael Hermann noted shortly before the vote, “If the [initiative for an additional pension payment] passes, it would be a sign that [Union Federation president Pierre-Yves] Maillard’s left-wing populism, which is also critical of the European Union, is almost more powerful today than the neoliberal populism of the [right-wing, conservative] Swiss People’s Party.”

A remarkably broad and active grassroots campaign started to take form, surprising even union officials. Their proposal had quite obviously struck a chord. From union activists handing out flyers at marketplaces to hastily organized rallies and even a presence at local sporting events like hockey games, there seemed to be a certain organic dynamic at play.

On campaign budgeting, the unions’ opponents clearly had the upper hand. At the start of the year, the Swiss Trade Union Federation, together with contributions from the Social Democrats, declared they could commit a little over 1.5 million francs. The opposing camp, led by Economiesuisse, the umbrella organization for big business and also supported by the Swiss Employers’ Association, revealed it had a budget of over 3.5 million.

But while the anti-union campaign was better funded, it proved to be both dull as well as clumsy, stumbling from one blunder to the next. The fact that almost all of its public proponents were big business leaders or retired politicians with sizable (taxpayer-funded) pensions clearly contrasted with the unions’ economic populism.

While focusing on its own initiative, the union movement’s campaign did not ignore the Liberal Party’s attempt to raise the retirement age. Partly, this was to avoid any nasty surprises come polling day. But it also strategically made an issue of this other proposal precisely because of its glaring unpopularity. Convinced that the final path to victory for the extra pension payment was less an issue of convincing voters — people’s minds were largely made up — and more one of getting out the vote, the unions sought to tap into the anger many working people felt at the suggestion they should work longer.

This anger was particularly pronounced in highly organized blue-collar industries such as construction and was only magnified by public statements by people like Christoph Maeder, the wealthy businessman and president of the above-mentioned Economiesuisse, who audaciously declared that he himself would gladly work until seventy and did not see the problem.

Class Alignment and Reverse Brahminization

When voting day eventually came around on March 3, even the first projections sent shockwaves through the political landscape. Shortly after voting locations closed, it became increasingly clear that despite all odds, the union had won big. Ultimately, the Liberal Party’s proposal to raise the retirement age was crushed — with a 75 percent no vote — and the union proposal for a pension payment raise was backed by 58 percent of voters. It was the first time in Swiss history that unions — or any political actor for that matter — had won a vote on a popular initiative to expand the welfare state.

Big business and the political right were livid. Obviously not used to losing, public figures such as Economiesuisse’s director Monika Rühl, criticized voters for “just looking after themselves.” Conversely, the importance of the vote was also noticed in neighboring countries, with well-known left-wingers from Gregor Gysi to Sahra Wagenknecht calling for the same in Germany.

Besides the referendum win itself, the real political earthquake may be further under the surface. For despite an extremely hostile mainstream media and every main political party except for the Social Democrats and the Greens calling upon their base to reject the pension boost, the unions clearly managed to transcend party lines.

While even notionally left-wing parties currently have a combined national vote share of only 29 percent, almost twice as many voters supported this clearly progressive project. In fact, representative follow-up surveys in the aftermath of the vote showed that huge numbers of people who would normally vote for right-wing parties had backed the union proposal. Remarkably, even a clear majority of the far-right Swiss People’s Party’s voters opted to ignore their leadership’s plea and instead support the expansion of pension payments.

So where was the line drawn? The leading Swiss media group Tamedia got to the heart of the matter with an article on the aforementioned follow-up surveys entitled: “A Victory for the Poor Over the Rich.” The alignment of voting behavior along class lines was indeed remarkable: the lower one’s household income, the higher the probability to have voted yes to raising pension payments, and vice versa. Simultaneously, the vote seemed to evade typical patterns of “Brahminization” that have in recent decades seen support for progressive ideas correlate with higher levels of education. There was a correlation, it just ran in the other direction: the higher your academic qualifications, the less likely you backed the pension rise, and vice versa.

The one warning sign the union movement should heed, however, is the fact — hardly surprising considering the topic — that younger voters were more skeptical of the unions’ proposal. This is especially important as the question of funding still has to be decided upon by the country’s parliament, with a center/right-wing majority that may well attempt to make working people shoulder the costs. Unions are surely aware of this risk — the pension move was and continues to be embedded in an umbrella campaign of “raising wages, pensions, and purchasing power” — but it is definitely something to stay vigilant about.

Are the Tectonic Plates Shifting?

The establishment’s panicked reaction to organized labor’s victory at the polls is well-founded. The outcome is indeed a seismic event in a country otherwise known for shying away from abrupt political changes. While the unions can certainly congratulate themselves on an effective campaign, several indicators suggest something deeper might be at play in today’s post-pandemic, high-inflation era.

Less than a decade ago, the unions initiated an almost identical proposal and were crushed by a 60 percent majority against. Now, they won big with precisely the inverse ratio. And in 2014, a union initiative to introduce a national minimum wage didn’t even manage 25 percent of the vote. Since then, the union has not only initiated, but also won several popular votes on local minimum wages in a number of cantons (the Swiss equivalent to states), including some that only years before had decidedly rejected the same in the national vote. Also, a union-supported initiative demanding better working conditions, a fairer financing system, and better training in the health care sector won a majority in 2021, just after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shortly before this year’s pension vote, even the neoliberal leaning newspaper NZZ noted that voters were increasingly embracing things they had only years before explicitly rejected: “The Swiss have turned to the Left — and are increasingly voting with their wallets.” The article also points out, however, that this has not translated into greater election victories for the parties of the Left, who hover just under 30 percent of the vote.

Claude Longchamp, a well-known political scientist in Switzerland, points in a similar direction and even chose the term “left-conservative shift” to describe both the “historic moment” the union victory on pensions represents and the somewhat ambiguous voting dynamics within which it is embedded. Longchamp even suggests that in the near future, Swiss unions might take on the role of a party substitute — a political voice for those who neither find a home in what they perceive as the hyperprogressive Social Democrats or Greens nor in a right-wing party such as the Swiss People’s Party, seen as pseudopopulist and demagogic when it comes to questions of solidarity. Given the Swiss system of “direct democracy” with its political instruments of popular initiatives and referendums, the union movement might indeed (willingly or unwillingly) fulfill such a role — at least in the short term.

In any case, unions in Switzerland will have their hands full in the upcoming years. Be that in looming contract fights such as that in construction, organizing the still highly unorganized health care sector, or in the numerous upcoming popular votes on issues directly affecting the working class. While each fight will be different, continuing to build commonsense solidarity both in workplaces and at the polls may prove to be a winning recipe in what has already proven to be a unique political era.