An indication of poverty levels is the number of shanty towns that seem to have sprung up outside the major Swiss towns; characterised by the wooden shacks, vegetable plots and no running water or electricity.

Cheers,
Nick

when I first moved here, I did think they were shantytowns.

well some people do live there....

With the tight house market, there might be more and more....

Poverty is a serious issue all over the world. For me it was hard to realise it actually existed in Ch too, rather ignorent of me. But if you dont mind me asking where are the poor people, i am not making fun of it at all. When I was living back in the UK and still now , the streets are teeming with homeless, and poverty is in your face, you turn a corner and you are in a neighborhood that is striken with poverty. I have been seing nothing but bling bling and more bling here. I am not working(not good enough german yet) and I can see it is very very though to make the ends meet. I can not buy meat, and luxury items, even cheese is 3 frank per 100 gr. (again i am not complaining for myself )
This country is expensive, not for those who work and earn here but for those who are not having a regular income for one reason or the other. I am curious as to see what are the social help criterias here and oh where are the council estates?? However after having travelled in India and having seen the poverty, as it is,there sadly, I dont know what to say about poverty in CH.

There are indeed many "working poor" - i.e. single working husband w/ wife & maybe 2 kids. If he's making "only" Sfr 5'000/mth he is probably just scraping along
Problem is that in cantons where low salaried immigration is rampant, salary dumping puts even more pressure on the ordinary folks, to whom 5k salaries are almost like a dream.

The category of the "working poor" eventually needs to resort to credit cards in order to pay for some holidays and to other forms of credit, potentially casting another layer of economic difficulty to their lives. Ain't easy.

Paul

Well if you are unemployed you get quite a good monthly payment for about 18 months then it stops.
After that you go to the sozialamt; they do not give you money - they loan it. If you find work they have first call.
BUT before they loan you money they research your Swiss relatives - if they are earning then they levy money from them. so you have a brother, for example, earning 5K per month with wife & kids & they levy 1K per month from them. Not funny?

marton

I BET YOU ARE NOT KIDDING, that is in some ways outrageous to force your blood relatives to support you. I am guessing if you wanted them to help you would approach them but to force them seems a little harsh and if you dont mind me sayin a bit backward.

Agreed that is why many people do not accept help from the state but try to survive without; this implies a desperately low standard.
Also why the poor hate foreigners because their out-of-country blood relatives are not forced to support.

Marton

So right it's backward.. so you've no job, no money and your relatives hate you cos' you're making them poor too. The government should just be done with it and issue credit cards to the unemployed and get the wonderful cash bubble on the go again..

Yes, it's true. In CH the Sozialamt can force you to pay for your relatives if they are in need. I once heard (unconfirmed) that things get even worse - if you are completely broke and have no one to support you, you get "deported" to your Bürgergemeinde (the village where your family originates from).

I would imagine that being poor in a country like CH must be horrible as there is very little understanding and you cannot expect people to be very compassionate with you (I'm slightly shocked from time to time when I hear my gf's family talk about other family members who lack financial means).

__________________
Conclusions contained in this post are based on assumptions which may or may not be correct, being based upon factors and events subject to uncertainty. Do not take them seriously or personally.

Yes, true.

My wife & I ran a self-help group for unemployed in our village for some months but sadly it failed.
Mixed reasons,
we found some people to provide free lunches but only enough for once a month.
A lot of local unemployed people did not join.
We had visiting speakers but mostly they just said something like "get off your arses & find work...."
The basic issue of finding work for people we never solved apart from "black" cleaning jobs which were v. low paid and too often not paid.

Surprisingly there is a lot of niche unemployment. For example, there were a number of skilled & qualified graphic designers - problem today is a lot of people buy Macs with suitable software & make their own designs/logos etc

Marton

From my experience, that is not entirely true. Sozialamt also requires foreigners to first obtain support from their relatives abroad to some degree.

True, but it is easier for foreigners to claim they have no relatives; should they want to go this way.

Marton

I read in 20Minuten or a similar paper a few days ago that hundreds of thousands (???!!) of people in Switzerland refuse to pay their premiums. Whether it is due to poverty or not was not clear. The paper said people prefer to go on holiday for that money, but I find it hard to believe that would apply to the majority of non-payers.

They did say that each of the major insurance companies has thousands of Betreibungen they are implementing and/or chasing each week.

Most shocking of all was, the companies said the premiums go up as they adjust for their losses. Basically, millions are left unpaid and split across the people who do pay. What I do not get, I thought most kantons have systems where you pay less if you are poor and you get a subsidy? But perhaps the remainder is still too much for the truly poor...that is awful.

There's also the not totally poor, but the working poor. In Basel, basic health insurance costs me nearly 400 a month (biggest savings I can get according to Comparis is about 20 or 30 a month, with a far inferior company). So if you're a couple, that's already between 700 and 800 you're paying to health insurance, add on rent (1100 - 1600 for an average apartment in an average neighborhood), Swiss grocery prices, Billag, etc. etc. etc. and suddenly you're looking at a very bleak bank balance. Add kids into the mix, and wow - that's a tough one unless you're pretty well paid.

People in that situation don't qualify for assistance with their health insurance premiums.

__________________

Now that just got my Hackles rising. Perhaps as intended.

But what the hells the matter with you boy?

Making claims to categorize an entire nation of people on the basis of the behaviour of the OBNOXIOUSly rich and what you see on Jerry Springer and MTV and pop culture.

You need to put your hiking boots on go travel in America. Meet some real Americans. I dont believe you traveled in America at all. With your attitude you'd have been on the receiving end of at least several severe beatings for flapping your mouth about what you dont obviously know squat about.

Americans are for the most part decent down to earth people. But at the same time were not victims of excessive sheepish humility. We do celebrate our achievements enthusiastically.
And the rest of the world seems more often than not more than eager to adapt our ways. For all you clowns who think america has no culture explain to me why our ways are embraced so whole heartedly by so much of the world.

Did we shove our music. food. clothing, tv shows.movies,engineering,chemistry,shoes, jeans, speech mannerisms, sports down your throat.
Is your culture, whatever it may be, as interesting to the rest of the world.

No baby.If Its all over the place Its there BY POPULAR DEMAND.

You calling every American you've had the misfortune to meet Pretentious is offensive to me and to most of the americans I know.

Perhaps your unfortunate social circle is a simple matter of birds of a feather flocking together.

THANKS
Bless your heart that is the most wonderful thing I've read on here in a long time.

I think it would be great to have a EF sponsored charity. We're really strong in numbers.

I worked at an office for a while where I , on a whim, started a collective euromillions lottery ticket buy. Pretty soon I had about a 140-160 people on board chipping in 900 to 1200 Chf EVERY WEEK.

Now this was for lottery tickets. I am certain we could coax a frank or two out of a lot of people here to equal or better those numbers for a worthy cause.

Who here has experience with charity organizations.?
Knows of good needy causes that we could campaign for?
Anyone like to start a commitee to analyze this and try to put something in place?
I'm convinced we could do something great.

Actually, the Marshall Plan and the American propaganda was where that all began. It *was *shoved down the throats of Europeans - and in some cases countries were told either to show the flims from America (which included those overly patriotic and whitewashed views of American society that proliferated after WWII in the American cinema) or they'd lose part of the money that was being spent on them. War-ravaged Europe didn't stand a chance, and did what they had to in order to survive.

Don't think for a moment that the American culture is so wonderful that the whole world wants to be American. Some may want to be a part of Hollywood America, but we both know that's so far from reality that it bears little semblance to it.

This has drifted off topic, but the point is that poverty exists here - less visible of course - than in America.

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Some of the poorest people in my office (eg 1 income and 3 kids) that always complain about not having any money are also the ones buying lottery tickets.

Take a look at the queues in the Kiosks on lottery day and how many of the people buying lottery tickets also buy a couple of scratch cards as well. It is so sad. They are aimed at the poor who think if they can just win they can change their life for the better. I grew up with a mother that would always buy these damn things, and we didn't have enough money for food. She even found them here and started buying them!

I wonder how many people that are not paying their insurance premiums can still find the money for lottery tickets?