Bonds, 2025,
colored pencil, pencil and pigment powder on paper, 37 x 56 cm,

Untitled, 2025,
colored pencil, pencil, inkjet print and ink on canvas, 42 x 81 cm

dear life, 2025,
inkjet print on paper,
42 x 57 cm

Untitled, 2025,
colored pencil, pencil and wax crayon on paper, 42 x 57 cm

Salami Tactics, 2025,
video, 23 min loop, stills

Grounds, 2025,
colored pencil, wax crayon and watercolor on paper, 53 x 73 cm, series of 6 drawings, photos Gina Folly

The call comes on a Tuesday morning. A self-assured voice presents itself as the regional secretary of the biggest private-sector union in the country. It takes him a moment to register who is calling—as realization settles in, a mixture of wariness and expectant relief flutter back and forth in him.

About eight months ago he had shown up at the union’s offices in resigned despair, egged on by his wife, who possessed an eager militancy in matters that concerned other people. The union represented many sectors—construction, cleaning, carpentry, hospitality, the metal industry. They even had a branch for gas station shop workers. Administrative work is not well protected. There are no collective bargaining agreements or industry standards—managerial whims dictate terms of employment. Workers are widely exposed to unpaid overtime, mobbing, salary stagnation and wrongful termination. The pharma industry has its own unions, which defend the interests of scientists and researchers. As a drug safety data analyst, he falls under the category of the administrative workers that must seek union advice not under the umbrella of their industry, but as individuals.

The man at the desk seemed surprised to see him and almost excited, as if they had scored a coup by gaining a member from one of the multinationals. It really was unheard of for an employee outside of the collective trade agreement sectors to walk into their offices and ask for help.

There is no guaranteed presence of external, independent unions at companies in Switzerland. The constitutional right for union representatives to enter public workplaces will be recognized by the federal supreme court in 2017, following a lengthy appeal process by the VPOD after their members are evicted from a government building in Ticino. Right of access for union organizers does not extend to the private sector—the constitution also protects private property rights, which are more vehemently upheld by the courts than freedom of association.

The local union branch is aware of widespread abuse of power at his place of work, but since he hadn’t been fired, there is not much they can do for him. Even then, wrongful termination would be difficult to prove and even more difficult to enforce, in a country that has not ratified the International Labor Organization’s convention on termination of employment. He talks to one of their lawyers, who advises him to go on sick leave to buy himself some time.



****



He had joined the company three years ago. The relief of finding a position after months of joblessness, a rotten pear stain on his employability, overshadowed any doubts he might have had about the place. Serono was a biotech company that had recently been bought up by Merck Pharma, to the tune of 16,6 billion Swiss francs. The buyout merged an insular, family-owned company staffed by French border workers and an international behemoth with a gazillion subsidiaries, eager to brush off its stodgy reputation by branching out into biotech. The new position is, on paper, a massive step up from the string of shady jobs he had taken in fits and starts since moving to Switzerland.

She barely remembers now what the actual job was. Was he paid on commission? Was there a salary? What did they actually do? A speck of an operation, run by a Russian-Swiss IT consultant and staffed by two so-called programmers, himself included. She is fuzzy on any concrete details and can’t even say if it was an IT operation, import-export or financial consulting. She recalls very clearly though the trip to Moscow, and the cloud of worry that accompanied her everywhere if he failed to get in touch at least once a day.

He embarks on his first job searches with leftover confidence from his professional experience in the US, oblivious to the inflexibility reserved for those who do not master the subtleties of cultural integration and who do not meet the increased requirements for hyper specific qualifications. He does manage to get a few data entry jobs, but the ones that are not temp positions end with him quitting in frustration after a few months. He interviews at Japanese American Tobacco, Procter and Gamble, and Philipp Morris. He draws the line at Glencore. Nothing comes of it and, though he is close to burning through the last of his savings, he is secretly relieved. And then he gets a call from one of the puffy headhunters that he had long ago given up on.

Their apartment overlooked a fire extinguisher factory. There was a smattering of garages, independent hardware stores, plumbing and electrical outfits, as well as a cargo train station and Europe’s oldest freeport. A single bus line ran every 30 minutes.
When they moved in, the zone was just starting to undergo the by now inevitable transformation from industrial zone to mixed-use service industry haven. A few months later, a new tramline inaugurated the decades-long project to transform the area. Next door to their smog-stained apartment building, a large private bank— industry leader in wealth and asset management—installed its headquarters.

In time, the local government set up a quango, a foundation tasked with guiding the development of the zone—finding real-estate buyers, expanding public transport links, building housing and infrastructure. Most of the land belonged to the state, but they had granted surface rights to many industrial companies. The foundation was tasked with buying back these rights and finding their occupants new locations, likely much further away from the center of town. Real estate development in the zone underwent a minimum of public scrutiny in the form of multiple initiatives and referendums, which stretched over several decades.

They observe this transformation in real time, and leave before it is completed.



****



The building is nicknamed “the glass whale”. It sits between the UN and the lake and is made up of 40’000 m2 of office space, spread across six buildings. The three newest buildings are entirely made of glass, a façade of transparency in an industry with iron-clad intellectual property rights and teeming with paranoia about corporate espionage. His direct superior, Jacky, is a weak, uninterested, and uninteresting little man, who wears brown suits and leaves the office at the stroke of 5 pm. His days are summed up by attempting to look busy and trying not to attract attention. One would feel sorry for him but for the fact that beneath the seemingly harmless exterior lies a tendency to sell other people down the river in times of crisis.

He goes back and forth on Jacky, is quite forgiving towards him up until the final months. The majority of his hate is reserved for Brigitte, the Director of Safety Data Management. Brigitte comes from the regulatory compliance side of supply-chain management and has laterally worked her way into Drug Safety and clinical trials management. She is a logistics coordinator with an MBA who clearly has little knowledge about the pharmacological aspects of the job and carries with her the arrogance of the ignorant. It was obvious from day one that he annoyed Brigitte. She was not one for conscientious employees who, though unlikely to actually call out her incompetence, let it transpire that they felt morally and intellectually superior to her.

He suspects she is constantly plotting her next move up the ladder, yet simultaneously gives the impression of clinging to her position for dear life. She obviously has a deep disdain for Jacky, her direct underling, and tramples over his authority by micromanaging his employees’ work. Under normal circumstances, he would have little to do with Brigitte, but her inability to delegate helicopters her right in his face. He starts coming home every night with three, sometimes four cans of beer. They have a tiny extra room that he uses as office, grow room, musical instrument storage. The room is directly opposite the front door—he crosses the hallway and goes directly into what she would like to call the man-cave, though she knows that such chauvinistic connotations do not fit the situation at all. At first, he still leaves the door open but in time closes it behind him,
often skipping dinner and staying in there until she has gone to bed.

The office is heavily staffed with international workers, self-described expats who drift from one multinational to the next. They all have different backgrounds, speak multiple languages and have lived all over the world, yet they are oddly similar, as corporate life has sanded them all down to the same colorless shade of conservative liberalism. Never spending enough time in one place to ever develop any real interest in local culture, they place their kids in English-speaking international schools and partake only in those activities that correspond to their romanticized idea of the country they are in. They have their own running groups and ski clubs and go for after-work beers in those cartoony pubs that cater to homesick brits and look like something out of a sitcom. The managers, though, are all locals, if one can really say that of them.

The work as a drug safety associate is long and tedious—reviewing incoming reports of adverse effects, entering the data, flagging safety patterns and reporting them. The reliability of pharmacovigilance reporting depends on the solidity of the database used. Currently, they do not have a designated person responsible for managing the database and updating its design to meet new regulatory requirements. Line managers at the company tend to pooh-pooh suggestions for change unless they are the ones making them, but he convinces Jacky to give him a trial run as a database manager, extending his current responsibilities.

The regulatory argument is hard for Jacky to get around—he doesn’t want to get caught with his pants down if a safety signal goes undetected. After about a year or so in his position as drug safety associate, there is an opening as a project manager on the team. There are five of them, who handle clinical trials data management and report directly to Brigitte. Her boss, Mark, the director of Pharmacovigilance, is apparently pleased with his work on the database and makes it clear that he would like him to take on the position. The opportunity to advance comes as a poisoned gift. Turning the offer down smacks of lack of ambition, raising questions he would rather not have asked. Taking it on would leave him directly exposed to Brigitte, who has it in for him and could come up with a multitude of ways to discredit his work. The only way is up.



****



He has night sweats that leave the sheets soaked through. They reek with a sickly-sweet smell and remain cold and damp for hours, clinging to the mattress cover in waves. The mattress is stained with acrid-smelling halos of yellowish stains. The glass whale was amongst the first offices in the canton with open workspace, the intention being to foster exchange between research and administration. The architects’ proposal promoted this idea with the following sentence: “the goal of open-plan structure is to reduce the time between the discovery and the marketing of a molecule.“ The employees are glassed in but free to roam from desk to desk, taking their login information with them wherever they go. The company leadership seemingly believes that spatial flexibility will make the workers more adaptable to the constant changes imposed upon them.

A long-reaching paralysis that sets in past the automated doors and security checkpoints. Jacky resents his new appointment and has started badmouthing him to his old team members. Solidarity is not exactly abundant. He had always suspected his rhetorical style and philosophical mindset to be above Jacky’s head and is now beginning to realize just how much his personality rubs people the wrong way. Brigitte does whatever she can to make him look incompetent. She is beginning to succeed. Then there is the episode with the shingles.



****



He has been at home for five months now and going back is not an option any longer. He looks out the window, across the tramline, at the fire extinguisher factory, as the union secretary, a Mr. Pedrazzoli, explains the reason for his call. The union has found out from the Swiss chemical and pharma employees’ association that Merck plans on closing the Geneva site and relocating their activities to Germany, the US, and China. Pedrazzoli is calling him because he is the only Merck Serono employee they have on file as a member. As they don’t have union presence onsite, they want to gain access to the employees through him. He is too zoned out to feel any anger. Through avoidance and weed, he has managed to distance himself from the crushing anxiety of the past years—the depression has not gone away, it has just changed shape, and will continue to do so. He tells Pedrazzoli that he is no longer with the company and has no contact with his ex-colleagues. There was only one way his long-term sick leave was going to end: with him getting fired. As it turns out, everyone will get fired, relocated, or forced into early retirement. The death of the company ends up being a windfall for him, as he is lumped in with the hundreds of people who are laid off. In his subsequent job searches, he ends up benefiting from the collective pity towards the ex-Merck Serono employees which is usually not afforded to the unemployed.



****



The announcement to close the site sends the local government into a panic. Members of the Conseil d’Etat rotate on the evening news, firmly stating their shock at this “unacceptable” decision. The cantonal parliament submits a resolution demanding that the executive intervene—all appeals for mediation are coldly rejected by the board of directors. Post-merger, from 2007 to 2011, the company had been accorded tax benefits which escaped parliamentary control due to fiscal secrecy. The company’s hasty departure from the canton triggers a so-called clawback provision, which foresees the reimbursement of a rumored twenty million francs in tax breaks. The canton is stuck with the loss of 1’250 high-income taxpayers, the company’s future corporate taxes, and unemployment and retraining costs for the five hundred employees who were either laid off or who refused to relocate.

The union does manage to connect with the employees, and organizes them into their first assembly, which takes place offsite. The decision to go on strike is unanimous. 3000 people take to the streets on May 1st, which is not a holiday in the canton. The strikes last until summer, when the employees accept the outcome of hard-won negotiations with the company leadership.

Eligibility for early retirement is lowered from 58 to 56 years, and minimum payout set at 25’000 Swiss francs. The company agrees to pad the retraining and reemployment fund set up by the canton with one million francs. The board of directors refuses to budge on basic compensation, which is set at one month’s salary per year of employment. Many people had been recruited a recently as one year before the closure, when upper management was already planning their next career steps in Boston, Beijing or Darmstadt. The decision to close the site was sold to the workers as having come exclusively from the headquarters in Germany.

A pilgrimage to Darmstadt even takes place, where the union and a core group of employees picket in front of the company’s headquarters. They get little sympathy from the local Betriebsrat, who are well aware that maintaining the Geneva site would result in job losses for them. For most of the employees in Geneva, this is the first and last involvement with any form of organized labor.



****



The repurposing of the site proves to be another nightmare for the government. The glass whale engenders extensive maintenance costs. Eighty full time employees are needed for cleaning and upkeep on the building, which features a 1000 m2 glass ceiling that opens automatically for natural ventilation with a system of eighteen giant hydraulic
cylinders.

The building, built by Serono and inaugurated just before the buyout, is located in an industrial zone. It was specifically constructed to meet the requirements of a biotech company and is little apt for most other commercial businesses. Merck, hoping to get as much as they can from the sale, pushes for a declassification of the site. As much as the Conseil d’Etat wants to avoid having 42’000 m2 of zombie property in the city, it is even more anxious about a real-estate speculation scandal—it refuses to declassify the site for tertiary activity and insists on a sale to an industrial company.

Merck maintains total silence on the sales process, which goes on for a year. Rumors of potential buyers abound in the press; two property developers end up suing the company for misrepresentation, alleging that information about the site was hidden in order to drive the asking price up. The building is ultimately sold to the original owner of Serono, who has submitted a proposal together with a Swiss-German engineer and billionaire philanthropist. The duo has formed a consortium with several Universities to form what they describe as a ”life sciences hub”. The Biotech Campus will “fuse the creative energy of start-ups and public research centers to become a leading site for neurosciences and biotechnology”.

The press never does manage to confirm the buying price, but it is rumored to be at 350 million Swiss francs. The sale of Serono to Merck seven years earlier resulted in a ten billion-franc profit for Serono’s owner. Members of the Conseil d’Etat, one after another, puff themselves up in interviews to the local press, expressing their relief over the sale and their excitement at the magnetism of such a project. The Biotech Campus does indeed prove to be a catalyst for the intermarriage of academic research and private industry in the region, and the term “Health Valley” is coined.



Marta Riniker-Radich, The Glass Whale, 2025, version for reading

GO BACK

Bonds, 2025,
colored pencil, pencil and pigment powder on paper, 37 x 56 cm,

Untitled, 2025,
colored pencil, pencil, inkjet print and ink on canvas, 42 x 81 cm

dear life, 2025,
inkjet print on paper,
42 x 57 cm

Untitled, 2025,
colored pencil, pencil and wax crayon on paper, 42 x 57 cm

Salami Tactics, 2025,
video, 23 min loop, stills

Grounds, 2025,
colored pencil, wax crayon and watercolor on paper, 53 x 73 cm, series of 6 drawings, photos Gina Folly

Free Market Solidarity Fear, magazine published in conjunction with the exhibition
The Glass Whale, text written in conjunction with the exhibition

[DOWNLOAD AS PDF VIA FOR SPACE]

The call comes on a Tuesday morning. A self-assured voice presents itself as the regional secretary of the biggest private-sector union in the country. It takes him a moment to register who is calling—as realization settles in, a mixture of wariness and expectant relief flutter back and forth in him.

About eight months ago he had shown up at the union’s offices in resigned despair, egged on by his wife, who possessed an eager militancy in matters that concerned other people. The union represented many sectors—construction, cleaning, carpentry, hospitality, the metal industry. They even had a branch for gas station shop workers. Administrative work is not well protected. There are no collective bargaining agreements or industry standards—managerial whims dictate terms of employment. Workers are widely exposed to unpaid overtime, mobbing, salary stagnation and wrongful termination. The pharma industry has its own unions, which defend the interests of scientists and researchers. As a drug safety data analyst, he falls under the category of the administrative workers that must seek union advice not under the umbrella of their industry, but as individuals.

The man at the desk seemed surprised to see him and almost excited, as if they had scored a coup by gaining a member from one of the multinationals. It really was unheard of for an employee outside of the collective trade agreement sectors to walk into their offices and ask for help.

There is no guaranteed presence of external, independent unions at companies in Switzerland. The constitutional right for union representatives to enter public workplaces will be recognized by the federal supreme court in 2017, following a lengthy appeal process by the VPOD after their members are evicted from a government building in Ticino. Right of access for union organizers does not extend to the private sector—the constitution also protects private property rights, which are more vehemently upheld by the courts than freedom of association.

The local union branch is aware of widespread abuse of power at his place of work, but since he hadn’t been fired, there is not much they can do for him. Even then, wrongful termination would be difficult to prove and even more difficult to enforce, in a country that has not ratified the International Labor Organization’s convention on termination of employment. He talks to one of their lawyers, who advises him to go on sick leave to buy himself some time.



****



He had joined the company three years ago. The relief of finding a position after months of joblessness, a rotten pear stain on his employability, overshadowed any doubts he might have had about the place. Serono was a biotech company that had recently been bought up by Merck Pharma, to the tune of 16,6 billion Swiss francs. The buyout merged an insular, family-owned company staffed by French border workers and an international behemoth with a gazillion subsidiaries, eager to brush off its stodgy reputation by branching out into biotech. The new position is, on paper, a massive step up from the string of shady jobs he had taken in fits and starts since moving to Switzerland.

She barely remembers now what the actual job was. Was he paid on commission? Was there a salary? What did they actually do? A speck of an operation, run by a Russian-Swiss IT consultant and staffed by two so-called programmers, himself included. She is fuzzy on any concrete details and can’t even say if it was an IT operation, import-export or financial consulting. She recalls very clearly though the trip to Moscow, and the cloud of worry that accompanied her everywhere if he failed to get in touch at least once a day.

He embarks on his first job searches with leftover confidence from his professional experience in the US, oblivious to the inflexibility reserved for those who do not master the subtleties of cultural integration and who do not meet the increased requirements for hyper specific qualifications. He does manage to get a few data entry jobs, but the ones that are not temp positions end with him quitting in frustration after a few months. He interviews at Japanese American Tobacco, Procter and Gamble, and Philipp Morris. He draws the line at Glencore. Nothing comes of it and, though he is close to burning through the last of his savings, he is secretly relieved. And then he gets a call from one of the puffy headhunters that he had long ago given up on.

Their apartment overlooked a fire extinguisher factory. There was a smattering of garages, independent hardware stores, plumbing and electrical outfits, as well as a cargo train station and Europe’s oldest freeport. A single bus line ran every 30 minutes.
When they moved in, the zone was just starting to undergo the by now inevitable transformation from industrial zone to mixed-use service industry haven. A few months later, a new tramline inaugurated the decades-long project to transform the area. Next door to their smog-stained apartment building, a large private bank— industry leader in wealth and asset management—installed its headquarters.

In time, the local government set up a quango, a foundation tasked with guiding the development of the zone—finding real-estate buyers, expanding public transport links, building housing and infrastructure. Most of the land belonged to the state, but they had granted surface rights to many industrial companies. The foundation was tasked with buying back these rights and finding their occupants new locations, likely much further away from the center of town. Real estate development in the zone underwent a minimum of public scrutiny in the form of multiple initiatives and referendums, which stretched over several decades.

They observe this transformation in real time, and leave before it is completed.



****



The building is nicknamed “the glass whale”. It sits between the UN and the lake and is made up of 40’000 m2 of office space, spread across six buildings. The three newest buildings are entirely made of glass, a façade of transparency in an industry with iron-clad intellectual property rights and teeming with paranoia about corporate espionage. His direct superior, Jacky, is a weak, uninterested, and uninteresting little man, who wears brown suits and leaves the office at the stroke of 5 pm. His days are summed up by attempting to look busy and trying not to attract attention. One would feel sorry for him but for the fact that beneath the seemingly harmless exterior lies a tendency to sell other people down the river in times of crisis.

He goes back and forth on Jacky, is quite forgiving towards him up until the final months. The majority of his hate is reserved for Brigitte, the Director of Safety Data Management. Brigitte comes from the regulatory compliance side of supply-chain management and has laterally worked her way into Drug Safety and clinical trials management. She is a logistics coordinator with an MBA who clearly has little knowledge about the pharmacological aspects of the job and carries with her the arrogance of the ignorant. It was obvious from day one that he annoyed Brigitte. She was not one for conscientious employees who, though unlikely to actually call out her incompetence, let it transpire that they felt morally and intellectually superior to her.

He suspects she is constantly plotting her next move up the ladder, yet simultaneously gives the impression of clinging to her position for dear life. She obviously has a deep disdain for Jacky, her direct underling, and tramples over his authority by micromanaging his employees’ work. Under normal circumstances, he would have little to do with Brigitte, but her inability to delegate helicopters her right in his face. He starts coming home every night with three, sometimes four cans of beer. They have a tiny extra room that he uses as office, grow room, musical instrument storage. The room is directly opposite the front door—he crosses the hallway and goes directly into what she would like to call the man-cave, though she knows that such chauvinistic connotations do not fit the situation at all. At first, he still leaves the door open but in time closes it behind him,
often skipping dinner and staying in there until she has gone to bed.

The office is heavily staffed with international workers, self-described expats who drift from one multinational to the next. They all have different backgrounds, speak multiple languages and have lived all over the world, yet they are oddly similar, as corporate life has sanded them all down to the same colorless shade of conservative liberalism. Never spending enough time in one place to ever develop any real interest in local culture, they place their kids in English-speaking international schools and partake only in those activities that correspond to their romanticized idea of the country they are in. They have their own running groups and ski clubs and go for after-work beers in those cartoony pubs that cater to homesick brits and look like something out of a sitcom. The managers, though, are all locals, if one can really say that of them.

The work as a drug safety associate is long and tedious—reviewing incoming reports of adverse effects, entering the data, flagging safety patterns and reporting them. The reliability of pharmacovigilance reporting depends on the solidity of the database used. Currently, they do not have a designated person responsible for managing the database and updating its design to meet new regulatory requirements. Line managers at the company tend to pooh-pooh suggestions for change unless they are the ones making them, but he convinces Jacky to give him a trial run as a database manager, extending his current responsibilities.

The regulatory argument is hard for Jacky to get around—he doesn’t want to get caught with his pants down if a safety signal goes undetected. After about a year or so in his position as drug safety associate, there is an opening as a project manager on the team. There are five of them, who handle clinical trials data management and report directly to Brigitte. Her boss, Mark, the director of Pharmacovigilance, is apparently pleased with his work on the database and makes it clear that he would like him to take on the position. The opportunity to advance comes as a poisoned gift. Turning the offer down smacks of lack of ambition, raising questions he would rather not have asked. Taking it on would leave him directly exposed to Brigitte, who has it in for him and could come up with a multitude of ways to discredit his work. The only way is up.



****



He has night sweats that leave the sheets soaked through. They reek with a sickly-sweet smell and remain cold and damp for hours, clinging to the mattress cover in waves. The mattress is stained with acrid-smelling halos of yellowish stains. The glass whale was amongst the first offices in the canton with open workspace, the intention being to foster exchange between research and administration. The architects’ proposal promoted this idea with the following sentence: “the goal of open-plan structure is to reduce the time between the discovery and the marketing of a molecule.“ The employees are glassed in but free to roam from desk to desk, taking their login information with them wherever they go. The company leadership seemingly believes that spatial flexibility will make the workers more adaptable to the constant changes imposed upon them.

A long-reaching paralysis that sets in past the automated doors and security checkpoints. Jacky resents his new appointment and has started badmouthing him to his old team members. Solidarity is not exactly abundant. He had always suspected his rhetorical style and philosophical mindset to be above Jacky’s head and is now beginning to realize just how much his personality rubs people the wrong way. Brigitte does whatever she can to make him look incompetent. She is beginning to succeed. Then there is the episode with the shingles.



****



He has been at home for five months now and going back is not an option any longer. He looks out the window, across the tramline, at the fire extinguisher factory, as the union secretary, a Mr. Pedrazzoli, explains the reason for his call. The union has found out from the Swiss chemical and pharma employees’ association that Merck plans on closing the Geneva site and relocating their activities to Germany, the US, and China. Pedrazzoli is calling him because he is the only Merck Serono employee they have on file as a member. As they don’t have union presence onsite, they want to gain access to the employees through him. He is too zoned out to feel any anger. Through avoidance and weed, he has managed to distance himself from the crushing anxiety of the past years—the depression has not gone away, it has just changed shape, and will continue to do so. He tells Pedrazzoli that he is no longer with the company and has no contact with his ex-colleagues. There was only one way his long-term sick leave was going to end: with him getting fired. As it turns out, everyone will get fired, relocated, or forced into early retirement. The death of the company ends up being a windfall for him, as he is lumped in with the hundreds of people who are laid off. In his subsequent job searches, he ends up benefiting from the collective pity towards the ex-Merck Serono employees which is usually not afforded to the unemployed.



****



The announcement to close the site sends the local government into a panic. Members of the Conseil d’Etat rotate on the evening news, firmly stating their shock at this “unacceptable” decision. The cantonal parliament submits a resolution demanding that the executive intervene—all appeals for mediation are coldly rejected by the board of directors. Post-merger, from 2007 to 2011, the company had been accorded tax benefits which escaped parliamentary control due to fiscal secrecy. The company’s hasty departure from the canton triggers a so-called clawback provision, which foresees the reimbursement of a rumored twenty million francs in tax breaks. The canton is stuck with the loss of 1’250 high-income taxpayers, the company’s future corporate taxes, and unemployment and retraining costs for the five hundred employees who were either laid off or who refused to relocate.

The union does manage to connect with the employees, and organizes them into their first assembly, which takes place offsite. The decision to go on strike is unanimous. 3000 people take to the streets on May 1st, which is not a holiday in the canton. The strikes last until summer, when the employees accept the outcome of hard-won negotiations with the company leadership.

Eligibility for early retirement is lowered from 58 to 56 years, and minimum payout set at 25’000 Swiss francs. The company agrees to pad the retraining and reemployment fund set up by the canton with one million francs. The board of directors refuses to budge on basic compensation, which is set at one month’s salary per year of employment. Many people had been recruited a recently as one year before the closure, when upper management was already planning their next career steps in Boston, Beijing or Darmstadt. The decision to close the site was sold to the workers as having come exclusively from the headquarters in Germany.

A pilgrimage to Darmstadt even takes place, where the union and a core group of employees picket in front of the company’s headquarters. They get little sympathy from the local Betriebsrat, who are well aware that maintaining the Geneva site would result in job losses for them. For most of the employees in Geneva, this is the first and last involvement with any form of organized labor.



****



The repurposing of the site proves to be another nightmare for the government. The glass whale engenders extensive maintenance costs. Eighty full time employees are needed for cleaning and upkeep on the building, which features a 1000 m2 glass ceiling that opens automatically for natural ventilation with a system of eighteen giant hydraulic
cylinders.

The building, built by Serono and inaugurated just before the buyout, is located in an industrial zone. It was specifically constructed to meet the requirements of a biotech company and is little apt for most other commercial businesses. Merck, hoping to get as much as they can from the sale, pushes for a declassification of the site. As much as the Conseil d’Etat wants to avoid having 42’000 m2 of zombie property in the city, it is even more anxious about a real-estate speculation scandal—it refuses to declassify the site for tertiary activity and insists on a sale to an industrial company.

Merck maintains total silence on the sales process, which goes on for a year. Rumors of potential buyers abound in the press; two property developers end up suing the company for misrepresentation, alleging that information about the site was hidden in order to drive the asking price up. The building is ultimately sold to the original owner of Serono, who has submitted a proposal together with a Swiss-German engineer and billionaire philanthropist. The duo has formed a consortium with several Universities to form what they describe as a ”life sciences hub”. The Biotech Campus will “fuse the creative energy of start-ups and public research centers to become a leading site for neurosciences and biotechnology”.

The press never does manage to confirm the buying price, but it is rumored to be at 350 million Swiss francs. The sale of Serono to Merck seven years earlier resulted in a ten billion-franc profit for Serono’s owner. Members of the Conseil d’Etat, one after another, puff themselves up in interviews to the local press, expressing their relief over the sale and their excitement at the magnetism of such a project. The Biotech Campus does indeed prove to be a catalyst for the intermarriage of academic research and private industry in the region, and the term “Health Valley” is coined.



Marta Riniker-Radich, The Glass Whale, 2025, version for reading

GO BACK