Organisational solidarity in Switzerland across fields : interlinkage between immigration and (un)employment

Published online: 01 January 2021Our chapter shows how institutional arrangements shape organisational solidarity across the fields of (un)employment and immigration in Switzerland. Key to our analysis is the assumption that Swiss organisational solidarity in the fields of (un)employment and immigration are partly conditioned and interrelated by common policy regimes related to immigrants’ legal permits and precarious workers’ status. We argue that the historical evolution of Swiss labour market policies and the enriched complexity of immigrants’ profiles have been translated into policy frameworks that mutually shape collective actors’ agency across the two fields. This particular entrenchment is effectively reflected in the interviews conducted for this study with actors from immigration and (un)employment associations. Although each field has a specific target group—immigrants versus workers or unemployed people—these categories are not mutually exclusive and mix easily. In a country of immigration like Switzerland, where a quarter of the active working population has an immigration background (Bundesamt für Statistik 2018a) and more than 17% of Swiss nationals hold dual citizenship (Bundesamt für Statistik 2018b), strict categories are de facto blurred. Consequently, by focusing on associations which benefit immigrants, precarious workers and unemployed people, we are interested in understanding when associations act in solidarity as enclosed fields, when they overlap and engage in solidarity across fields, but also when their action is missing