immo!nvest – Die Plattform für Standorte und Immobilien

Tag: SECO

  • Location promotion and labour market

    Location promotion and labour market

    According to a press release from the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs(SECO), State Secretary Helene Budliger Artieda has appointed Martin Saladin as the new Head of the Directorate for Economic Promotion. She has also confirmed Martin Godel as the new Head of the Labour Market and Unemployment Insurance Division. Both will take up their new positions on 1 September 2024 and will thus become members of SECO’s Executive Board.

    Martin Saladin will succeed Eric Jakob as Head of the Directorate for Location Promotion. Among other things, this supports Swiss companies that are facing increasingly global competition. According to the press release, Saladin has international experience and is familiar with the challenges faced by Swiss companies on international markets. For the past five years, he was Head of Operations South/East at SECO’s Economic Cooperation and Development Division, where he managed the project business with an annual investment volume of CHF 350 million.

    Martin Godel will take over from Oliver Schärli as Head of the Labour Market and Unemployment Insurance Division on 1 September. Godel has been Deputy Head of the Directorate for Location Promotion since 2014 and has been Head of SME Policy since 2011. He has extensive experience in the digitalisation of services. He has been responsible for the EasyGov.swiss service portal for the Confederation, cantons and communes since 2017.

  • Association of Master Builders demands increase of the threshold to eight percent

    Association of Master Builders demands increase of the threshold to eight percent

    In a report published on Friday, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO speaks plainly on the job notification requirement: “The development of the unemployment rate has a delayed effect on the number of occupational types subject to mandatory notification.(…) This means that at times of historically low unemployment, particularly in the second half of 2022, relatively many occupational types were subject to mandatory job notification.” With consequences for various sectors such as the construction industry. “Due to the simultaneous increase in demand for labour, various areas of the labour market entered a phase of shortage of skilled workers and labour,” the SECO report “Enforcement Monitoring of the Mandatory Job Notification” continues. This situation has only calmed down since the list of occupations subject to compulsory notification was reduced to a practical level as of 1 January 2023, thus more than halving the scope of the job notification requirement.

    The Swiss Association of Master Builders (SBA) also notes that the job notification requirement works in principle from a technical point of view and that the information advantage it gives jobseekers also offers advantages for the economy – provided that the regional employment centres (RAV) can actually forward dossiers of suitable candidates to companies for vacancies. This is because the perspective of the past has repeatedly led to a number of occupations with a clear shortage of skilled workers being subject to compulsory registration. This has had consequences in the main construction industry in particular: for jobs as concrete builders, cementers or the collective category that includes “other professions in the main construction industry”, the probability of successful placement has been a mere 1.5 to 2 per cent, according to estimates by the Institute for Economic Studies in Basel. In view of these vanishingly small chances of success, the construction companies rightly complain about the high costs involved in reporting a job to the RAV.

    Corrections to the mandatory job notification system are necessary
    It is therefore all the more important that the motion “Mandatory job notification. Re-introduction of a practical threshold value” by Erich Ettlin of the City Council, which is mentioned in the SECO report as one of several political initiatives on the job notification requirement, should now be dealt with and passed quickly in parliament. If the threshold value is eight percent instead of five percent in future, as called for by the motion, the danger of distorting temporal effects is much smaller. SBC also supports approaches that improve the quality of the survey methodology for the relevant percentage and make greater use of digital tools.

  • Federal government plans platform for major foreign projects

    Federal government plans platform for major foreign projects

    The federal government wants to help Swiss companies to get better contracts in connection with infrastructure projects. To this end, at the end of 2019 it decided to set up a coordination office at the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs ( SECO ).

    According to a statement , the Federal Council is now making a total of 7.8 million francs available for the years 2022 to 2024. The aim is to strengthen and expand the networking of actors such as the official foreign trade promoter Switzerland Global Enterprise , export risk insurance SERV and other federal agencies and interested business associations.

    The federal government is also planning a digital platform that will bring together the supply and demand for infrastructure projects abroad. SERV should also target general contractors and project sponsors who might be interested in Swiss suppliers.

    The federal government also assumes that the expansion of the infrastructure will increase the demand for innovative solutions for sustainable development. Therefore, employees of the external network are to receive more advanced training in the area of cleantech.