The Swiss Delusion of Compliance

In Switzerland, public authorities like to maintain an immaculate conscience through a remarkably simple administrative ritual: the self-declaration. A private vendor signs a form promising to obey every regulation on the books, a bureaucrat files the document, and the state considers its duty fulfilled. The uncomfortable flaw in this comfortable arrangement has now been laid bare in Central Switzerland, where the country’s premier private security contractor, Securitas, turned statutory labor law into little more than a set of optional guidelines.

Internal data from the Securitas regional directorate in Lucerne, verified by SRF, reveals that the company logged more than 20,000 violations of employment laws between 2023 and 2025 alone. Across three years, over 900 security guards were subjected to illegal work patterns featuring excessive night shifts, severely curtailed rest intervals, and illegal overtime. At the Zug correctional facility, legal limits on night duty were exceeded on virtually every single night over three years, with only one single exception. Tired guards were routinely placed behind the wheels of patrol cars and scooters, or worked 14.5-hour night shifts despite the law setting a hard ceiling at 13 hours.

What renders this breakdown particularly striking is that over a third of these infractions took place during assignments for the public sector. Federal asylum centers in Glaubenberg, Eigenthal, and Emmen, alongside the Lucerne Cantonal Hospital and state detention facilities, functioned smoothly precisely because security staff worked illegal hours. At the Glaubenberg facility in Obwalden, approximately 80 employees accumulated at least 1,800 hours beyond legal limits, while nearly 100 guards were deprived of more than 4,800 hours of mandatory rest time.

Faced with these figures, Securitas conceded that its operational reality fell short of legal mandates, noting: We have verified the allegations and recognized that the practice partly does not comply with labor law principles and internal values. Nevertheless, the firm rejected any charge of systematic exploitation. Instead, management framed the tens of thousands of breaches as isolated responses to short-term cover needs, unexpected security incidents, and staff sickness.

The public authorities who contracted these services reacted with the customary innocence that defines Swiss officialdom. The State Secretariat for Migration, the Canton of Zug, and the Lucerne Cantonal Hospital all insisted they had no prior knowledge of any wrongdoing. Their stance remains predictably formalistic: compliance is entirely the vendor's problem. Legal experts, however, point out that state bodies make themselves tacit accomplices when they procure services that cannot realistically be delivered within the boundaries of the law without asking basic operational questions.

Cantonal labor inspectorates across Central Switzerland have announced joint reviews, professing ignorance of the conditions inside institutions under their jurisdiction. Whether this sudden regulatory zeal leads to actual consequences—such as contract cancellations, license revocations, or criminal charges—is a question few in the administration appear eager to address. For now, the episode stands as a textbook study in corporate convenience enabled by bureaucratic naivety.

Written by Christiane Hofreiter christiane.hofreiter@alpineweekly.com