Poverty: A New Swiss Discovery

When Maria Diaz emigrated from Portugal to Switzerland 11 years ago, she was hoping to find a better world for herself and her infant daughter. But she soon discovered that life in Switzerland wasn’t a box of chocolates. The 32-year-old Geneva office cleaner and single mom has been struggling to make ends meet on 2,000 a month, a meager wage in a place where her one bedroom apartment alone costs 800 a month. “Some months, after buying food and paying rent, utilities and health insurance, I have 30 left in my pocket,” says Diaz, who’s looking for a second job. “That’s not even enough to buy my daughter a pair of sneakers.” Maria is part of Switzerland’s growing population of working poor, people who barely manage to scrape by in one of the world’s wealthiest nations.

Lately social groups, trade unions and left-leaning political parties have brought the poverty problem to public attention. But coherent statistics are hard to come by. Because the country has historically had so few poor, “we have no tradition of gathering data on poverty,” admits Stphane Fleury, a researcher at the Federal Statistical Office. “We know how many bees there are in Switzerland, but not how many poor people.” But according to figures from Swiss Labor Assistance, a workers’ rights organization partly funded by the government and trade unions, some 535,000 people — 7.5% of the 7.2 million population, up from 5.5% in 1992 — now live below the poverty line of 2,020 a month for a single parent with a child. Roughly half of that number are like Diaz, working full time but struggling at the lowest end of the salary scale.

Two factors are largely to blame for swelling the ranks of the poor: an influx of immigrants that began in the 1960s and the recent economic downturn. In the past 40 years, the Swiss recruited hundreds of thousands of unskilled foreign workers to fill low-paying jobs. By the 1990s, there were approximately 500,000 living permanently in Switzerland. When the crunch came, even though overall unemployment remained low at 2.6%, “a large number of poorly qualified people lost their jobs,” says Yves Flckiger, who studies poverty trends at the University of Geneva. To slow immigration, the Justice Ministry has proposed a draft law that would limit work permits primarily to highly skilled E.U. nationals.

Though there is no national minimum wage, welfare payments administered by individual municipalities are available to the needy. But poverty carries with it a social stigma, and many people are too ashamed to ask for help. “A strong work ethic is part of Swiss culture,” says Brigitte Steimen, director of Swiss Labor Assistance. “Being poor is seen as one’s own fault for not working hard enough.” Diaz, who puts in 40 hours a week, has a healthy work ethic. But she says she is “too embarrassed to ask for handouts.” Nevertheless, she doesn’t regret emigrating to Switzerland: “It’s not easy, but I would rather be poor here than in Portugal.”