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The 2018 edition of the OECD Jobs Outlook, the great annual work of OECD economists, begins with good news: for the first time, there are more people working today than before crisis. The employment rate is expected to reach 62.1% by the end of 2018 and even 62.5% in the fourth quarter of 2019. But the organization is also worried about "stagnation without previous wage ", a phenomenon that particularly affects Switzerland. Explanations with Andrea Bbadanini, the editor-in-chief of the report
Le Temps: The graph you publish shows a deceleration in the growth of real wages in Switzerland from the end of 2012, this growth even becoming negative at the end of 2014. Comment can wages fall in a country where the labor market is under stress, with an unemployment rate close to the incompressible level?
Andrea Bbadanini: There are several reasons for this. First, the slowdown is due to the rapid rise in real wages from 2010 to 2012, which increased from 0.5 to almost 3% at the end of 2012, partly because of the fall in prices: there is therefore an effect catching up to this "excess" of growth, a correction effect. The fall in productivity is the second factor: all countries are affected but Switzerland more than the others. This productivity, an annual increase of 1% before the crisis, stagnated between 2012 and 2017, even at times declined. But it is the rise in productivity that allows companies to increase wages. The only other two countries where productivity has fallen are Greece and Portugal.
Read also : The disturbing stagnation of Swiss productivity (post of our blogger Cédric Tille, January 2018)
Why the Is Switzerland doing worse than other OECD countries after the recovery?
Productivity growth is particularly weak in Switzerland, where the 2008 air gap continues. The labor market has become polarized. Those who are well adapted to the economy and digital have seen their wages increase, in our report we indicate that the real earnings of the highest paying 1% have grown much faster than those of full-time median workers, accentuating a trend already well established. But a whole series of intermediate jobs, which were good jobs, disappeared during the crisis. People have since found jobs certainly but less good, less qualified, less paid. These people are still trying to find a better job, the number of applications per offer has doubled in ten years. The share of part-time jobs suffered doubled in Switzerland from 2007 to 2017.
See also : Swiss wages must be protected
What you point to is therefore an unbalanced labor market, where supply and demand are not adapted …
Exactly. We are in the paradoxical situation that there have never been so many vacancies, companies complain about not finding the skills they are looking for: and at the same time, the average salary does not increase because many people can only get a low-skilled job. There is a cruel lack of highly skilled digital skills. Clearly there is a huge need to develop skills, and it's not just about the initial training system, it's clear that the problem is lifelong, digitalisation means that work has changed – at the OECD, we are hiring three times fewer secretaries than ten years ago! You have to know how to anticipate and invest well in advance. This problem is not that of Switzerland, the anemic growth of wages also concerns Germany, for the same reasons. Switzerland remains one of the richest countries, but must address this problem of skills adaptation.
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