«Part of my income is in GBP. I've had successive pay cuts in the past few years, precisely because of the exchange rates. Is it unfair that I am "paid less", for doing the same work? No, it's just part of economic realities.»

Yes, it is unfair,it can only be unfair, I also received several cuts on my salary before I came here, I got so many cuts that suddenly the amount of money I received in the end of the month was less than an unskilled worker,it was so low that I could not afford to pay for any rent anywhere (thinking about buying a house could only be a phantasy), those were not economic measures, those represented exactly the opposite.
I just hope the pattern doesn't install here also, the end of these kind of policies is always bad for everyone.
Oh, and yes we have a name for this: we call it «divide to reign» once you put people against each other you can control them better, what a shame it is happening here.

This exchange rate is making some very happy, and others very frustrated (or more). We came to retire here (my home country) on our UK pensions- and have lost 50% of income since our arrival- through absolutely no fault of our own. Thank goodness we bought a house in a very cheap part of CH (and beautiful too) and can live frugally (plenty of practice in our younger years). We live next to the French border, and in nearby France they are having huge problems staffing nurseries, schools, hospitals, old peoples homes, businesses, restaurants - as every French person who lives within 50km (or more, one worker here comes all the way from Belfort every day!) wants to work here in CH- as they earn more than twice what they would earn at home. Not fair that the local (French) patients, elderly, children, customers, etc - do not get decent staff to help and 'service' them, just because they live near the border. When my parents were in an old peoples home here (in CH) 90% of the staff were French.

Totally agree it seems absolutely wrong to have someone doing the same work, but paid differently (mind you in CH women are still paid significantly less for the same job)- and yet. What should frontaliers now be paid x 2 and more than 2 years ago - and much more than Swiss taking costs into consideration (health insurance, food, rents, utilities, etc, etc).

Winner and losers on all sides - life defo not fair. Those French workers who decided to take a mortgage in CHF instead of Euros took a big gamble (just like we did when we moved here to retire).

58,08 % in Haut-Rhin is not a fairly small share.

When I was a kid here, the area on the French side was very poor and run down- and house owners were practically non-existent. Now it looks all spruced up, lots of new villas with gardens, flowers. Due to much higher salaries on Swiss side, and low French cost. Good on the frontaliers I say. But very tough on those who have nobody to look after them in hospitals, schools, etc.

In a crisis, it's the Swiss hospitals in places like Geneva that won't have any staff as they will have to stay at home, If bird flu had happened, life in CH hospitals would not have been good.

You speak about France while I speak about South Alsace (Haute Alsace). In real total the share of people in the Haute Alsace living in their own houses may well be up to 75%,. but this is mostly the rural population. Most of the urban population lives in rented apartments. The houses in private ownership actually on the market are beyond the possibilities of the average money earner from either Basel, Lörrach or Mülhausen

And when you speak about France, do not forget that it is lot of a difference between areas in the Champagne and Bourgogne and metropolitan regions around Paris, Bordeaux and Marseille.

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if you now deduct the many rural parts of Haut-Rhin from the calculation the rate for the urban Mülhausen-area will clearly drop to heavily below 50%

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Do not forget that also in the past, houses outside the MLH-StLouis area were privately owned, even if looking run down. Many of those house-owners of the past used the opportunity to sell. Some of them used their incomes as frontaliers to upgrade their own houses. The other side of the coin is the rapid growth of quarters with large apartment blocks in MLH

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The area near me is rural Franche-Comté- so quite different. The local town, Pontarlier, also looked very sad indeed in those days- but is quite gentrified now, thanks to Frontaliers money.

You said Alsace. And I don't think most people working in the companies in question live as far as Mulhouse.

This of course is nice. But what I generally reject is statements from CH people all along all borders who in view of such observations "thanks to us" or "without us there ...." while these frontaliers were vital in building up small and large companies along all borders, maintaining them and expanding them. Back to BSL-MLH-airport, were they working in Switzerland, the Swiss trades unions could help them and often do in such cases, but the "Swiss zone" of BSL-airport is only Swiss customs-wise and otherwise simply French territory. The access road from the Swiss side has always been and still is under the control of the French Gendarmerie.

St. Louis, Blotzheim etc are rather urban areas, but it of course is different west of the airport. But I rather think that the owners of the nice villas are the CH bosses

I think you missed the point. I didn't get pay cuts - my GBP income has remained the same. It's only a cut when I convert it to CHF. My client isn't being unfair to me - why should the fact I've chosen to work in CH have any bearing on the amount they pay? So where is this "unfairness" of which you speak?

These workers are earning more Euros, even after the changes, than they were two years ago. Not bad.

Doing work for a foreign company, being paid in the local currency of that company, and then saying "oh, it's a paycut" is NOT THE SAME as a company arbitrarily picking another currency to pay you in, and also reducing your salary to take into account historical (i.e. in the past) exchange rate differences.

I thought it would be clear from my stated location that I was talking about Alsace when I said "round our way". Specifically the Sundgau, about 20km W of Basel and 10km from the nearest Swiss border.

*shrug* Same as it ever was.

It's true that house prices in the (French) Basel suburbs are vastly inflated compared with the villages further West,which is, oddly enough, why we chose to buy further West. But if you compare the prices with those around any major Urban conurbation in other countries, as a proportion of income, I don't believe you'll see a significantly different trend. The only real difference is the steepness with which prices drop if you're prepared tolive just a little further from the Basel-Mulhouse axis. I've never understood why people would choose to pay ~50% more to live in Sierentz or Bartenheim. They still need a car for anything we do, and commuting times are only marginally less, so what's the draw? Maybe they just can't bear to be away from the noise of the aeroplanes coming in to land