Who Cleans the 10-Million Switzerland? The People Nobody Votes On Are Already Here

1. Geneva led the way: out of the shadows and registered — and 85 % pay in

In 2017 and 2018, the canton of Geneva regularised 2,390 undocumented workers through “Opération Papyrus”. The vast majority of applications concerned domestic work — cleaners, childminders, care assistants; in the UNIGE cohort studied, around 72 % worked in the domestic economy. A longitudinal study by the University of Geneva (“Parchemins”) measured the consequences.

The Geneva figures refute the fear narrative: whoever opens the legal route gains tax and AHV contributors — not welfare cases.

The scale is national: according to a study by the State Secretariat for Migration, around 76,000 undocumented people live in Switzerland; roughly half work in private households, and nine in ten of working age are employed. In the Geneva cohort, around three quarters were women, mostly from Latin America and the Philippines.

2. The AHV is already missing millions today — in the living room

While the campaign wrestles over securing the social-insurance system, contributions worth millions slip past the welfare state unnoticed. Of an estimated 400,000–500,000 households with domestic staff, only 68,247 use the simplified settlement procedure created for them — roughly one in six to seven.

In absolute terms, that was just 68,247 households in 2024 — 6 per cent fewer than the year before. Some register additionally via the ordinary AHV procedure; the rate is therefore an indicator of how much the simplest channel is used, not an exact undeclared-work rate.

Context: according to the BSV, the sharp break in 2021–2022 is largely a reclassification (a large provider became a direct employer in 2021 and has reported via the ordinary procedure ever since). The figures therefore do not overstate pure de-formalisation; the decline since then, 2022–2024, amounts to −7.5 %.

Through this legal channel, only CHF 26.9 million in AHV contributions flowed in 2024. Private households are indeed classed by the federal government as a high-risk area for undeclared work — but because they do not count statistically as businesses, they fall out of the comparison of inspection density per employee and remain largely under the radar.

Anyone who seriously wants to secure the AHV need not talk about immigration first, but about the invisible millions that flow past the welfare state every month inside people's own homes.

An older industry estimate (quitt.ch, 2017) puts the AHV loss alone at up to CHF 320 million when nannies and carers are included. Clino deliberately uses the conservative calculation — the picture stays the same: Switzerland's largest uncontrolled undeclared-work sector is people's own home.

3. 95 per cent immigrant: who cleans and cares for Switzerland

The initiative targets immigration — and with it the very people without whom the lights would literally go out in Swiss households. In the cleaning industry, according to the social partners, around 95 per cent of the roughly 80,000 workers have a migration background; about 80 per cent are women.

One blind spot is especially telling: private households as employers are excluded from the national business register — the industry that keeps countless households running does not appear in the official business statistics at all.

4. The care gap meets a population cap

Switzerland is ageing rapidly — and the need for care rises precisely when the initiative wants to cap immigration. By 2050, the number of people over 80 doubles from 0.46 to 1.11 million (BFS scenarios 2020–2050); the old-age dependency ratio rises from 32.9 to 44.9.

A large share of the care is taken on by migrant live-in carers, mostly from Eastern Europe — in a “statistical no-man's-land”, as the health observatory calls it, with no official register. The care gap cannot be voted away by an initiative.

5. Geneva shows it can be done — the rest of the country has no system

One simple question remains unanswered in the debate: why is it so cumbersome in Switzerland to register domestic staff properly? The comparison with neighbouring countries is clear — Switzerland is the only one among them without a national system that makes registration simple and attractive.

And it is precisely Geneva that provides the proof that such systems work: there, the declared share of domestic-work wages rose over roughly two decades from about 5 to 71 per cent.

Geneva shows that formalisation need not be coercion, but a question of an easy route. Switzerland has the recipe within its own borders — it just applies it in a single canton.

6. Cleaned undeclared today, on supplementary benefits tomorrow

Undeclared work in the household is not a private saving — it shifts the costs into the future. Anyone who cleans and cares today undeclared or below the pension-fund threshold builds up barely any pension and ends up in old age disproportionately often on tax-funded supplementary benefits.

Domestic staff are predominantly female and usually work part-time, often in several households. If the individual wage is below the BVG entry threshold of CHF 22,680 (2026), no mandatory second pillar arises — not even if several small workloads together would exceed it.

Old-age poverty by gender — women are affected almost twice as often (BFS).

The missing contributions of today are the supplementary benefits of tomorrow — paid for by all of us.

The figures for your canton

The dependency is distributed regionally. Geneva combines the highest density of undocumented workers and a large share of cross-border commuters; Ticino lives on cross-border commuters; and in most cantons the national NAV minimum wage (from 2026 CHF 20.35/h for unskilled work) is the only wage protection for domestic staff.

Absolute cross-border commuter figures are estimated from the BFS shares of the total (411,000); undocumented figures are SEM estimates from 2015 (still the official ones). The majority of cantons have no statutory minimum wage.

What the figures mean

Clino makes no voting recommendation. But the data shifts the question: away from who comes, towards how we treat those who are already here. The people who clean our homes and care for our parents have long been here and have long wanted to belong — registered, insured, paying in. Geneva shows that this works.

Press-ready headlines

Clino is the Swiss platform with which private households can legally hire their domestic staff in just a few minutes — contract, payroll, AHV and accident insurance included. Undeclared work becomes a proper employment: fair for the employees, legally secure for the employers.