Women in Switzerland strike for fair pay, equality
16 June, 2019
Thousands of women across Switzerland walked off the job, burned bras and blocked traffic Friday in a day of demonstrations to demand fairer pay, more equality and an end to sexual harassment and violence. It was the first such protests in the Alpine nation in 28 years.
Discontent over sexism and workplace inequality in prosperous Switzerland underpinned the women’s strike. Many protesters were also demanding more pay specifically for domestic workers, teachers and caregivers — jobs typically held by women.
Swiss female lawmakers — mostly decked out in purple, the movement’s color — streamed out of parliament Friday in the capital of Bern, where several thousand women were demonstrating, public broadcaster RTS reported.
Hundreds of marchers also blocked roads near the main train station in Zurich, the country’s financial center.
Demonstrators in Geneva’s Parc Bertrand hoisted a banner showing that only 8 percent of jobs in engineering were held by women in Switzerland, in contrast to 91 percent of the country’s domestic help jobs.
The Swiss Federal Statistics office says women on average earned 12 percent less than men for similar work — the so-called “gender pay gap” — as of 2016, the latest figures available.
In late afternoon in Geneva, thousands spread out on the city’s landmark Plainpalais square in a sea of purple — chanting, waving flags and holding up defiant signs like one that read: “Don’t touch my uterus.”
Earlier in Lausanne, hundreds of women rallied at the city’s cathedral around midnight Thursday and marched downtown to set wooden pallets on fire, throwing items like neckties and bras into the inferno. A few women scaled the cathedral to shout out the hour, a Swiss tradition rarely carried out by women.
In Lucerne, hundreds of women staged a sit-down protest in front of the city’s theater, according to the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper, and some of the paper’s female reporters joined in.
People across the country wore face paint or stickers.
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