Workplace bullying in Switzerland: what the law actually says

What legally counts as mobbing

There is no mobbing article in Swiss law. A claim rests on the employer's duty of care, CO art. 328. The Federal Supreme Court requires all elements together — a single incident, however bad, does not meet the definition.

The two duties that do the work

Art. 328 para. 1 CO, in the official English translation on Fedlex: «Within the employment relationship, the employer must acknowledge and safeguard the employee’s personality rights, have due regard for his health and ensure that proper moral standards are maintained. In particular, he must ensure that employees are not sexually harassed and that any victim of sexual harassment suffers no further adverse consequences.» Paragraph 2 adds that, to safeguard personal safety, health and integrity, the employer «must take all measures that are shown by experience to be necessary, that are feasible using the latest technology and that are appropriate to the particular circumstances of the workplace or the household», provided such measures may reasonably be expected of him.

Art. 6 para. 1 of the Labour Act (ArG / LTr) says the same thing from the public-law side and names personal integrity explicitly: beyond protecting health, the employer must take the necessary measures to protect the personal integrity of employees. Art. 2 of Ordinance 3 to the Labour Act spells that out further — the employer must issue all instructions and take all measures needed to maintain and improve the protection of physical and psychological health, including organising the work suitably.

One detail matters for anyone signing a Swiss contract: Art. 328 CO appears in the list in Art. 362 CO, the provisions that may not be varied to the employee’s detriment by agreement, standard employment contract or collective agreement (GAV / CCT). A contract can improve on the protection. It cannot sign it away.

Where to read the description — and in which languages it exists

SECO files Mobbing under psychosocial risks at the workplace and calls it a form of violence at work that harms the personal integrity of those affected. The five categories listed above are taken from that page, and the page is published in German, French and Italian. There is no English version of it, which is a recurring feature of Swiss official information rather than an oversight: the same applies to the Federal Statistical Office release quoted further down, which states in its English edition that only the lead paragraph is translated.

That has a practical implication if you are working here in English. The vocabulary you will meet in an HR conversation, a cantonal form or a court file is German, French or Italian: Persönlichkeitsschutz, intégrité personnelle, integrità personale. Searching for «bullying» in Swiss official sources returns very little; searching for Mobbing returns the actual material. The Labour Act itself is one of the acts Fedlex publishes only in German, French and Italian — the Code of Obligations and the Gender Equality Act do carry English translations, marked as provided for information.

The description is not a legal definition and binds no court. It is, however, what the responsible federal office publishes, it is identical in structure across the three language versions, and it is the reference point most Swiss employers use when they write their own internal rules — SECO offers downloadable text blocks for exactly that purpose.

The one part that does have a statutory definition

Sexual harassment is defined, and it is defined narrowly. Art. 4 of the Gender Equality Act (GlG / LEg) treats as discriminatory any harassing behaviour of a sexual nature or other behaviour related to a person’s sex that adversely affects the dignity of women or men in the workplace, and names threats, promises of advantage, coercion and the exertion of pressure to obtain sexual favours. Art. 3 prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex more generally.

The remedies differ from the ordinary contract route. Under Art. 5 para. 3 GlG a court may award compensation where the employer fails to prove that it took the measures that experience shows are necessary and appropriate to prevent sexual harassment — the burden of showing prevention sits with the employer. That compensation is calculated on the basis of the Swiss average wage and is capped, by Art. 5 para. 4, at six months’ pay.

A point that is easy to get wrong: the eased burden of proof in Art. 6 GlG — discrimination is presumed once the person concerned shows it is plausible — lists the areas it covers one by one, namely allocation of duties, working conditions, pay, training and further education, promotion and dismissal. Sexual harassment is not in that list. If you are reading the Act to work out where you stand, read Art. 6 before relying on it.

Who enforces it, and why the answer is a canton

The two routes lead to two different places. The Art. 328 CO route is contractual and ends at a civil court. The Labour Act route is administrative, and Art. 41 ArG assigns it: subject to Art. 42, implementation of the Act and its ordinances is the responsibility of the cantons, which designate their own competent authorities and a cantonal appeal body. Under Art. 42 the Confederation supervises and may issue instructions to the cantonal authorities.

So the office you would deal with has a different name, a different parent department and a different procedure depending on where you work — and «where you work» means the canton, not the country. For someone who moved here for one job in one canton, this is the single most common surprise about Swiss employment law: there is no national labour inspectorate to call.

There is also a group the Labour Act simply does not cover. Art. 3 ArG excludes, among others, employees performing higher managerial duties or scientific or independent artistic work, clergy and other church personnel, commercial travellers and several further categories. If you are a senior manager, the administrative route may not be open to you at all; the contractual duty under Art. 328 CO still is.

If a dismissal follows the complaint

Swiss law has no dismissal protection labelled Mobbing, but it has the abusive termination. Under Art. 336 para. 1 let. d CO, a termination is abusive if it is given because the other party asserts claims under the employment relationship in good faith. Art. 336a sets the sanction: compensation determined by the court in the light of all circumstances, up to a maximum of six months’ salary.

Art. 336b attaches two deadlines that come before any argument about the merits. A party wanting compensation must object in writing to the party giving notice, at the latest by the end of the notice period; and if no action is brought within 180 days of the end of the employment relationship, the claim is forfeited. These run whatever else is going on.

Where the case is a discrimination case under the Gender Equality Act, Art. 10 GlG adds protection: a dismissal that follows an internal complaint, or a referral to the conciliation body or the court, without good cause may be challenged — for the duration of those proceedings and for six months afterwards, and it must be challenged before the notice period ends.

Resigning, and what unemployment insurance does with that

Leaving is where the question meets a second, quite separate test. Art. 30 para. 1 let. a of the Unemployment Insurance Act suspends benefit entitlement where the insured person is unemployed through their own fault. Art. 44 para. 1 let. b of the implementing ordinance (AVIV / OACI) specifies that this covers someone who terminated the employment relationship themselves without having been assured of another job — unless remaining in the post could not reasonably be required of them.

That final clause is the door, and it is judged on its own terms by the unemployment fund and the cantonal authority, not by the civil court and not by reference to whether the conduct was Mobbing. The scale is in Art. 45 para. 3 AVIV: 1 to 15 suspension days for slight fault, 16 to 30 for medium, 31 to 60 for serious; and para. 4 classifies giving up a suitable job without a new one assured, absent an excusable reason, as serious fault. Suspension days are days without daily allowance which still count against the total entitlement.

Immediate termination by the employee is governed by Art. 337 CO: it requires good cause, defined as any circumstance which makes the continuation of the employment relationship in good faith unconscionable for the terminating party, with the court deciding at its discretion. A separate money claim for satisfaction after an unlawful injury to personality rights has its basis in Art. 49 CO, and requires that the seriousness of the injury justifies it.

What the federal survey measures

The Swiss Health Survey records nine categories of psychosocial risk at work, one of which groups discrimination and violence together. In the 2022 results, women reported experiencing discrimination or violence at work more often than men: 21 per cent against 16 per cent. The Federal Statistical Office attributes the gap mainly to sex-based discrimination in the twelve months before the survey, reported by 8.4 per cent of women against 1.5 per cent of men.

Sexual harassment was mentioned by 1.7 per cent of women and 0.4 per cent of men; among women aged 15 to 29 the figure was 4.1 per cent. The share of women reporting sexual harassment rose from 0.6 per cent in 2012 to 1.7 per cent in 2022. Over the same decade, stress at work showed the largest increase of any working condition surveyed, from 18 to 23 per cent, and 53 per cent of stressed respondents also described themselves as emotionally exhausted at work. Among the emotionally exhausted, 27 per cent showed signs of depression, against 5 per cent of everyone else.

None of that creates an entitlement. It does establish the scale: the federal statistician treats these exposures as an ordinary feature of the Swiss labour market, measured on the same basis across a decade, and not as an edge case.

The kind of employer this usually happens at

The model behind most guidance — an internal complaints office, a trusted person to go to, a written policy on personal integrity, for which SECO supplies ready-made text blocks — assumes an organisation large enough to have those things. Our own stock of live Swiss adverts suggests how often that assumption fails: 45.9 per cent of the employers advertising have exactly one open advert, and 79.9 per cent have five or fewer. Those four-fifths of employers account for 23.7 per cent of all adverts.

At the other end, 0.5 per cent of employers advertise more than a hundred roles at once and supply 22.9 per cent of the adverts. If you work for one of those, an HR function and a written procedure almost certainly exist. If you work for the others, the person you would complain about may be the person you would complain to — which is precisely when the cantonal route under the Labour Act stops being the second option and becomes the first independent one.

Open adverts are a proxy for hiring activity, not for headcount: a large employer that is not currently recruiting does not appear in this count at all. The direction holds regardless, and the duty under Art. 328 CO does not scale with size — a five-person firm owes exactly what a bank owes.

Why the first stop is your employer and not an office

This is not bureaucracy, it is how Swiss employment law is built. No public office has the job of deciding whether you were bullied, because the law places the responsibility on the employer and gives the canton the job of checking that the employer discharges it. Art. 328 CO sits in contract law and binds your employer directly; Art. 6 of the Labour Act and Art. 2 of Ordinance 3 are the public-law counterpart, imposing duties on the same person and giving the canton oversight.

In practice that means a report to an authority does not replace the conversation inside the company; it follows it. SECO’s handbook names three internal addresses — a trusted contact person, to talk the matter through; the line manager of the person who behaved improperly; and legal steps. As a fourth option it names considering whether you want to keep working there, and in the same list adds the warning to avoid rash reactions such as an ill-considered resignation.

If you have moved to Switzerland from a country with a strong statutory works council, do not assume an equivalent here. The Swiss employee representation under the Participation Act is thinner and rarer than the name suggests: it becomes possible from fifty employees, it is not mandatory, and it only comes into being if a fifth of the workforce asks for the vote.

Inside the company: the trusted person, HR, and what each can promise

The three internal addresses differ mainly in one respect: how much confidentiality they can promise. SECO’s handbook describes the trusted contact person as a confidential first port of call and states that in principle everything that person does happens only in agreement with the person seeking advice. About HR the same handbook says the opposite: supervisors and the personnel department cannot guarantee complete confidentiality, because they sit in a line function.

That is a description of a role, not an accusation. Someone who receives a report and at the same time acts for the organisation cannot promise to do nothing. This is why SECO recommends that internal trusted persons stand in no line relationship to the employees seeking help, and that their role, tasks and powers be set down in a written company directive.

Whether that directive exists where you work is a question of fact, not of law. SECO publishes text blocks and a checklist for it — and its checklist asks exactly the questions you can ask: is there an internal or external trusted person to turn to in a conflict? Is that role defined? Do employees know how to reach them? Do they know the procedure for breaches of personal integrity?

The cantonal labour inspectorate: what it can do, what it cannot, and for how long

Under Art. 41 of the Labour Act enforcement is the cantons’ job, with the Confederation exercising oversight through SECO. The office you approach is therefore called Arbeitsinspektorat, Amt für Wirtschaft und Arbeit, KIGA, inspection cantonale du travail or ispettorato cantonale del lavoro depending on where you are — and it is the canton where the business is based, not where you live.

What it can do, SECO describes soberly: the enforcement bodies can visit the business to form a general picture of working conditions, and where they gain the impression that there are serious problems with the protection of personal integrity, they will require the company to take corrective measures. Under Art. 51 of the Labour Act the authority first points out the provision that has not been followed, and if the party at fault does not comply, issues a formal order backed by the criminal-law warning of Art. 292 of the Criminal Code.

What it cannot do, the same source states just as plainly. It is neither referee nor mediator. It does not decide whether you are right. And SECO names a cost that few people know in advance: employees who approach the labour inspectorate and seek its support run the risk that their employer will hold that step against them. That is why the order — internal first, in writing, dated — is not a formality but the record everything later rests on.

We opened all 26 cantonal pages the federal chain points to

For the addresses of the labour inspectorates, SECO’s handbook refers readers to the directory of the Inter-Cantonal Association for Employee Protection. We opened that directory on 29 August 2026 and loaded every page it links to, in order to answer one simple question: does someone sent there because of bullying learn on that page that they have come to the right place?

Of the 25 cantons we could measure, nine name at least one of the four relevant terms — bullying or harassment, psychosocial risks, sexual harassment, or personal integrity. Sixteen name none of them. Five use the word Mobbing itself. This does not mean the other offices are not competent: competence follows from Art. 41 of the Labour Act, not from the contents of a website. It means that for sixteen of them, the path from the federal referral to a cantonal answer runs through a search you have to perform yourself.

The differences are large and specific. The canton of Schwyz publishes a downloadable leaflet titled "Are you a victim of bullying?" and links onward to the cantonal crime-prevention page on psychological violence — one of the few pages addressing the affected person rather than the business. Uri links SECO’s handbook and the psychosocial-risks page directly. Ticino runs its own page covering stress, burnout, conflict, bullying and harassment together.

Two observations concern the directory itself. The link for Neuchâtel points to an address that no longer exists; the office is reachable at a new address, but not by the route the federal guidance sets out. And the two Appenzell half-cantons appear as two separate offices while carrying the same e-mail address, the same telephone number and the same website. One entry is not a canton at all: the city of Lausanne runs its own municipal labour inspectorate and is the only commune in the whole directory.

For sexual harassment the route runs through a different door

When the conduct is sex-related it is not only the legal basis that changes but the address book. For bullying in general the Confederation maintains no contact point at all; for this area it maintains several. The Federal Office for Gender Equality points to the conciliation authorities in cantons and cities, keeps a list of the services affected people can approach, and links a confidential online first-advice service whose menu today offers nine languages — alongside German, French and Italian also English, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. For a reader working in Switzerland in English, that is the one federal channel in this field that answers in your language.

The sequence the Office sets out for affected people is more concrete than anything that exists for bullying in general: ask the person in writing to stop; talk to someone you trust and keep a dated record of incidents; inform the person responsible for such cases in your company, the personnel department or your line manager; send the complaint by registered post and make sure it is minuted or bring a witness. And if the responsible body inside the company does not do enough: go to the cantonal conciliation authority.

A separate costs rule keeps that path usable: Art. 113 para. 2 lit. a and Art. 114 lit. a of the Civil Procedure Code exclude court costs in Gender Equality Act disputes regardless of the amount at stake, and Art. 243 para. 2 lit. a assigns them to the simplified procedure irrespective of value. What legally constitutes sexual harassment, and what protection against dismissal it triggers, is covered by the neighbouring question on this page; here the point is only that the classification also changes who you can turn to.

Conciliation, court, and what it actually costs

SECO is honest about money: external help, it writes of counselling and coaching offered by unions, staff associations and equality offices, usually comes at a cost. For the legal route that is only partly true, and this is the part people tend not to know.

Art. 197 of the Civil Procedure Code puts an attempt at conciliation before a conciliation authority ahead of the decision proceedings. In that procedure Art. 113 para. 1 rules out party compensation, and Art. 113 para. 2 lit. d rules out court costs where the employment dispute does not exceed CHF 30 000. Art. 114 lit. c draws the same line for the decision proceedings.

What those provisions do not do matters just as much: they do not cover your own lawyer, and in the decision proceedings the losing party can still be ordered to pay the other side’s party compensation. The exemption concerns the court’s own fees, not the whole risk. If you hold legal-expenses insurance or a union membership, that is the place to check what is covered before starting proceedings.

The order matters — and resigning comes last

Almost every bullying story contains the same moment: you cannot take it any more and you resign. For the question of who to turn to, that is the most expensive moment, because it closes two doors at once. The first is the labour inspectorate, which according to SECO can do nothing further for a former employee. The second is unemployment insurance: resigning without having another position lined up can lead to suspension days under Art. 30 of the Unemployment Insurance Act and Art. 44 of its ordinance, the exception applying only where staying could not reasonably have been expected of you.

What counts then is not what you experienced but what you can evidence at the moment of resignation. The message to the trusted contact person, the dated written complaint, the medical certificate, the company’s reply or the absence of one — all of it has to pre-date the resignation, because none of it can be created afterwards. So the useful order is this: report internally first and keep a record of the report, then ask the RAV what a resignation would trigger in your specific case, and decide only after that.

The guidance exists in German, French and Italian — and not in English

This is the part that matters most if you were hired in English. SECO’s handbook on protecting personal integrity exists in German, French and Italian. It does not exist in English: on 29 August 2026 the English address of the same file returns the identical German-language document, byte for byte, and SECO’s English site index contains no page on the subject at all. The Labour Act, Ordinance 3 to the Labour Act, the Unemployment Insurance Act and its ordinance are published on Fedlex in the three official languages only. The Code of Obligations, the Gender Equality Act and the Civil Procedure Code do have English versions, prefaced by Fedlex itself with the note that English is not an official language of the Confederation and that the translation has no legal force.

That gap is not academic. In our own holding of live Swiss job adverts, 28.2 per cent of those whose language is unambiguously German, English, French or Italian are written in English — and that group is 71.9 per cent of all live adverts. Among employers running at least three current adverts, 13.6 per cent advertise exclusively in English. A substantial share of the people working in Switzerland were recruited in English and will not find the instructions for a breach of their personal integrity in the language they were hired in.

For the sexual-harassment slice the picture is better: the Federal Office for Gender Equality runs its page in English as well, and the confidential online first-advice service it points to offers counselling in nine languages including English, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. For bullying without a gender dimension there is no federal equivalent. The practical consequence is a Swiss one: the words on the internal complaint you write, and on the report you send the cantonal office, are better written in the language of the canton, because that is the language the file will be read in.