2023-09-29 17:09:14
– Children are not a private matter!
Musician Sophie Hunger knows from her own experience how precarious childcare is in Switzerland. In the guest article she calls for a rethink.
Sophie Hunger
Published: September 29, 2023, 7:09 p.m
Campaigns for more government support for child care: Singer Sophie Hunger during a concert in Berlin.
Photo: Britta Pedersen (Keystone)
Years ago I wrote the song “Heicho,” which says that if I die, I will definitely come home. Art is a revolt, and so is having children? I was happy to return to Switzerland for life, for the most beautiful and radical of all creations: starting a family.
A few months after the birth of my child and the obligation to go back to work, I realized how precarious childcare and the return to work of women in Switzerland are. There is no daycare center in our village, and places in the next small town are so rare that a two-year break from working life seems unavoidable. Maternity insurance covers 14 weeks. How, please, is that supposed to work?
In Switzerland, the monthly bill for daycare costs around 35 percent of one’s income – in no other country in the world do parents have to sacrifice such a huge portion of their wages for childcare. The National Council passed a law in the spring that was intended to reduce parents’ daycare costs by 20 percent through federal contributions. The ball was on the penalty spot, the Council of States just had to sink it. But now the drama: dominated by the bourgeois factions, the authorized commission plays the ball out of bounds in order to – hurriedly – produce its own version that is gentle on the federal government. At the same time, he is postponing the final discussion until after the elections, fearing the political risk.
It is unacceptable that parents have no structures to balance work and family.
The Council of States consists of 74 percent men, whose average age is 59.5 years. This Council of States is not representative and inevitably undemocratic. Very few members of the state council even know how much a daycare place costs. The Alliance F petition I am promoting asks parents to upload their bills to show the hard facts. The receipt from a Zurich mother: She pays over 5,000 francs per month for two children, nota bene, in part-time care.
There are things that you can put up with as a Democrat. Military spending for an army that is unable to defend itself, billions in subsidies for agriculture whose products end up in the trash, or billions in bailouts for private banks that steal from themselves. I grant it to the Air Force pilots, I grant it to the farmers, I grant it to the employees of the financial institutions. But the fact that parents don’t have any structures to balance work and family is unacceptable. Equality in particular is completely unattainable under these conditions. It is precisely here, after the birth of a child, that women’s structural decline begins.
Children are the basic condition for the success of our system.
Who should pay for that? At the moment the mothers are paying for it. They pay with the loss of their income, the resulting loss of pensions and with total material dependence on their partner. This brings no benefits to the families or the state. Economically it is a lose-lose situation. There is a shortage of qualified workers in Switzerland. The mothers we have expensively trained are sent home after the birth of a child. A successful family policy is not a utopia. It is already being practiced in enviably successful countries. It’s embarrassing to pretend that this is all a mystical mystery, like the whereabouts of the Unspunnen Stone.
Children are not a private matter! The functioning of our entire political system depends on the growth of a new generation. Children are the basic condition for the success of our system. Quite objectively: Who will pay the pensions of our councilors? And with respect: Without children, the office of a parliament will one day become obsolete anyway.
Therefore, dear Council of States: Either do your job or give up your office and work full time looking after your grandchildren. In short: change or diaper! As a reminder, elections are on October 22nd.
Childcare in Switzerland
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