Association of Master Builders demands increase of the threshold to eight percent
The Swiss Federation of Master Builders (SBC) sees its position confirmed by the SECO report "Monitoring the implementation of the job notification requirement" published on Friday. For the first time, it admits that at times of historically low unemployment, many occupational types were unnecessarily thwarted by the job notification requirement, although they are actually affected by a shortage of skilled workers and labour. To ensure that such contradictions are not repeated in the future because of the past perspective, SBC demands that the notification threshold be increased to eight per cent.
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.