Protesters gathered in Basel and beside the villa of Novartis AG Chairman Daniel Vasella on Saturday to voice opposition to hefty job cuts announced by the Swiss pharmaceutical company and others. Outraged by news that Novartis is eliminating 1,100 jobs in Basel and the small town of Nyon, Swiss union Unia, and Juso, the youth faction of the Socialist Party, urged people to demonstrate.
The Basel-based group's decision to slash jobs in its home market came just a month after US-based chemical maker Huntsman Corp said 600 of its jobs could go in Basel, a blow to the town of 190,000 inhabitants that has deep roots in the chemicals and pharma sector.
About 20 protesters gathered in a field opposite Vasella's walled lakeside mansion. The Novartis chairman received two Juso representatives who handed him a fake pink slip. He laughed, a Reuters witness reported. Vasella is one of Switzerland's highest-paid executives and in 2009 animal rights activists set fire to his Tirolean hunting lodge.
Meanwhile in Basel, about 1,000 people, among them workers at the Nyon site Novartis aims to shut, marched across the River Rhine and past the city's 16th-century town hall in a bid to convince Novartis and Huntsman to reverse their decisions, a Reuters witness reported.
"It's absolutely inconsiderate and not understandable when a highly profitably company such as Novartis eliminates more than 1,000 people's jobs, just to become more profitable," Novartis employee Brigitte Martig, who also heads the regional Unia chapter, said. Novartis and rival Roche AG, which announced cuts last year, have stressed their commitment to investing in Switzerland, though both are outsourcing some operations as they deal with pricing pressures and a strong Swiss franc.