Word: swiss
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Except for its dollars, pounds and francs, the rest of the world has never really been good enough for the Swiss, who for 300 years have looked down their Alpine noses at the other people on earth. Until now, the foreign civil servants at Geneva's Palais des Nations, the businessmen taking tax shelter in Zurich and Zug, and the hordes of common laborers from Italy and Spain have been grudgingly tolerated. No more. With 15% of the nation's 5.9 million people holding foreign passports, the sensitive Swiss have suddenly come down with an acute case...
Rome's Mercy. Everything from late trains to overloaded telephone lines is blamed on the foreigners. A Swiss housewife who returns a faulty appliance is likely to be told: "Madame, 'Made in Switzerland' no longer means it's made by Swiss." However snide, the comment is correct: 38% of Swiss industrial labor is now foreign, and it soars to 85% in the Swiss construction industry, 90% in the canning factories. Advertisements of rooms for rent often assert "Swiss only"-or, more precisely, "No Mediterraneans...
...result has been that foreign workers, whose families are often back home in the Mezzogiorno or Andalusia, are jammed into old army barracks or cheap rooms, sometimes even sleep in unfinished apartments on their construction jobs. Unable to integrate with Swiss life, they have their own ghettos, complete with trattorie and Italian movie houses. Swiss industry shudders at what would happen if their countries were to recall the workers abruptly. "Our economic life is at the mercy of Rome and Madrid," moans one official...
...Dirty Work. Many responsible Swiss and most of the nation's press deplore the new inhospitality. "Telling Europeans to go back to Europe is the best proof that we are still living in the world of the past," says one Geneva businessman ruefully. The Gazette de Lausanne pointed out that the foreigners are in Switzerland in large part because the Swiss want somebody else to do the "servile or dirty work, and prefer white-collar and clean-hand jobs," and, if the foreigners are expelled, the Swiss will be the first to suffer. Syndicalisme blasted the ousters as "Helvetic...
Pollution & Politics. Building transalpine pipelines poses mountain-size-and at times hill-size-problems. Unexpected construction problems and disputes with Swiss authorities over routing changes have put ENI behind schedule on the Central Europe pipeline. A 342-mile branch is still lying idle because the German town of Lindau refuses to allow the construction of a five-mile segment along the shore of Lake Constance. Reason: fear that the pipe might burst and spew oil into the lake, polluting the town's water supply. The new Trans-Alpine project has already encountered its first delay. Indecisive elections have left...