Tamedia staff strike across Switzerland over 41 job cuts
Thursday 5th November 2026 on 15:31 in
Switzerland
Employees at media company Tamedia staged a one-hour warning strike in Zurich, Bern and Lausanne to protest 41 planned job cuts, SRF reported. They are demanding that the dismissals be withdrawn, a two-year freeze on redundancies and a collective labour agreement.
About 150 employees and supporters gathered outside Tamedia’s headquarters in Zurich at 11am. Staff also left their buildings in Bern and Lausanne. The workforce approved the warning strike by a clear majority on Monday.
Tamedia board chairman and publisher Pietro Supino has offered to meet employees, but they say they are standing by all their demands. They said repeated rounds of cuts offered no future prospects and that the way the dismissals were handled had damaged trust.
In Zurich, protesters hung up partially blank newspaper pages and held signs reading “Journalism instead of AI” and “We demand a future perspective”. The strike ended after an hour with a whistle concert.
A large part of the Bern newsroom took part in the strike and listened to speeches from Zurich by live link. Afterwards, staff held a protest outside their newsroom on Bubenbergplatz. Signs included “Stop selling off journalism” and “People instead of margins”. One journalist said employees were also protesting the way the dismissals had been announced.
About 60 people demonstrated outside the newsroom in Lausanne and around 30 in Geneva. Vaud state councillors Nuria Gorrite (SP) and Isabelle Moret (FDP) joined the Lausanne protest. In a statement, employees in French-speaking Switzerland criticised two dismissals they considered abusive and said the job cuts were creating a climate of fear.
Tamedia’s staff commission said it was watching developments with great concern, adding that the latest job cuts had left employees deeply unsettled and angry. It urged management and the board to begin negotiations on the workforce’s demands.