The general strike of November 1918

Bank clerks on strike

The social crisis of the last war year reached the financial centre itself before it reached the rest of the country. Among the groups whose real incomes had fallen most sharply were salaried employees, including the clerks of the Zurich banks. Their salaries had been set in a world of stable prices, and the banks were slow to adjust them although they were earning well from the war. In 1917 the clerks founded the Zürcher Bankpersonalverband as an employees’ association within the Kaufmännischer Verein Zürich. According to the finding aid of the Swiss Social Archives, which holds its records, about two thirds of the bank employees in Zurich joined almost at once.¹

At the end of September 1918, after the bank managements had refused their demands, the Zurich bank employees went on strike. Their central demand was a minimum monthly salary of 225 francs. The strike, which began on 30 September 1918, was a novelty in Swiss history: white-collar employees of the most respectable institutions of the city, men who wore collars and ties and regarded themselves as part of the bourgeoisie, stopped work and picketed their banks. The Zurich workers’ union (Arbeiterunion) declared a local general strike in solidarity. On the second day the bank directors gave way.² The Historical Dictionary dates the bank employees’ strike to 30 September and 1 October 1918.³

For the bourgeois establishment of Zurich, the bank strike was a shock. It showed that the discontent reached far beyond the industrial working class and that the organised labour movement could paralyse the city in support of salaried employees. Many historians see in it one of the events that convinced the military leadership and the bourgeois parties that a revolutionary situation was developing. The bank clerks did not, however, take part in the general strike of November. According to the SRF account, the bank employees stayed away from the later strike movement.⁴ The Bankpersonalverband itself lost members during the 1920s. The episode remains one of the few moments in the history of the Zurich financial centre when its employees acted as a labour movement.

The Olten committee and troops in Zurich

The political leadership of the labour movement during the last year of the war lay with the Olten Action Committee (Oltener Aktionskomitee), founded in February 1918 as a liaison body between the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions. Its immediate occasion was the resistance to a planned compulsory civilian service. Its best-known member was the Bernese Social Democrat Robert Grimm.⁵ During 1918 the committee threatened a general strike several times in order to extract concessions from the Federal Council on food supply, prices and wages.

The military leadership viewed these developments with growing alarm. General Wille and the commander of the Zurich troops, Emil Sonderegger, regarded Zurich as the likely centre of a revolutionary movement. On 4 November 1918 Wille sent a memorandum to the Federal Council warning of a sudden and unexpected outbreak of revolution and requesting a massive military presence in the main cities. On 7 November federal troops marched into Zurich in a demonstration of force. The Olten committee answered with a 24-hour protest strike on 9 November. On 10 November demonstrators and soldiers clashed on the Fraumünster square in Zurich, where the labour movement had planned a celebration of the first anniversary of the Russian revolution. According to German Wikipedia, about 7,000 people gathered on the Münsterplatz despite a ban, and one soldier was killed in the confrontation.⁶

In response to the events in Zurich, the Olten committee proclaimed an unlimited nationwide general strike from midnight on 12 November 1918. The Swiss Federation of Trade Unions later counted about 250,000 strikers. Railway workers played a crucial role because their participation extended the strike into rural areas.⁷ The Federal Council mobilised about 95,000 troops, among them some 20,000 for Zurich and 12,000 for Bern.⁸ Marco Jorio has pointed out that the figure of 250,000 strikers may be exaggerated and that the strike was followed mainly in the German-speaking towns, less in the countryside and in the Italian- and Romansh-speaking regions.⁹

On 13 November the Federal Council, supported by a large majority of the Federal Assembly, issued an ultimatum demanding that the strike be called off. The Olten committee, fearing that military repression would lead to civil war, decided during the night of 13 to 14 November to end the strike. On 14 November, in Grenchen in the canton of Solothurn, soldiers fired on strikers who refused to disperse and killed three young watchmakers.¹⁰ The strike ended formally on 15 November. The military justice system prosecuted more than 3,500 people, of whom 147 were convicted. Among those sentenced to prison were the leaders Robert Grimm, Friedrich Schneider, Fritz Platten and Ernst Nobs.¹¹ Ernst Nobs, editor of the Zurich Volksrecht in 1918, became in 1943 the first Social Democrat elected to the Federal Council and served as head of the Federal Department of Finance, a career that illustrates how completely the labour movement was later integrated into the federal state.¹²

The nine demands and the financial centre

The strike programme of the Olten committee contained nine demands. They included the immediate re-election of the National Council by proportional representation, active and passive women’s suffrage, a general obligation to work, the 48-hour week, the reorganisation of the army as a people’s army, measures to secure the food supply, old-age and disability insurance, a state monopoly of imports and exports and the payment of the public debt by those with property.¹³ The last demand was directly aimed at the owners of capital. It anticipated the debate about a one-off wealth levy to repay the war debt, which the Social Democrats put to the vote in the form of a popular initiative in 1922, when it was clearly rejected.¹⁴

Several of the demands were realised quickly. The National Council was elected by proportional representation for the first time in 1919, which ended the absolute majority of the Radicals and nearly doubled the seats of the Social Democrats. The 48-hour week became law in 1919 and 1920. The constitutional article on old-age and survivors’ insurance followed in 1925, although the insurance itself (AHV) took effect only on 1 January 1948. Women’s suffrage at the federal level had to wait until 1971.¹⁵ The Nationalmuseum’s account stresses that neither side pushed the confrontation to the point of civil war, and that the strike ultimately contributed to the social partnership that underpinned Swiss stability in later decades. For a long time, however, bourgeois historiography presented the strike as a failed revolutionary attempt, an interpretation that the Historical Dictionary expressly records.¹⁶

For the Zurich financial centre, the general strike had three consequences that are still perceptible. The first was political. When the bourgeois parties closed ranks against the left, the fear of revolution shaped the political culture of Zurich and of the country for a generation. Citizens’ militias and civic defence leagues were founded, the Schweizerischer Vaterländischer Verband among them, while the labour movement remained excluded from federal government until 1943. The second consequence was monetary. Since the experience of 1914 to 1918 had shown the social danger of inflation, the national bank drew from it the lesson that price stability was a precondition of social peace. James has noted that the bank engineered a relatively smooth disinflation in 1919, with a severe but very short-lived downturn.¹⁷ The third consequence concerned capital. The demand for a wealth levy and the strength of the labour movement made wealthy Swiss and foreign clients more sensitive to the confidentiality of their banking relationships. The discretion that Zurich banks offered their clients acquired a political dimension that it had not had before 1914.

Notes

1. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, finding aid “Ar 481 Zürcher Bankpersonalverband”, https://www.findmittel.ch/archive/archNeu/Ar481.html, section on the history of the association, its foundation in 1917, its rapid growth, the strike of late September 1918 and the merger with a moderate rival association in November 1923. ↩
2. Mirjam Fuchs, “Klassenkampf – Als in Zürich die Banker streikten”, SRF News, 16 August 2017, https://www.srf.ch/news/klassenkampf-als-in-zuerich-die-banker-streikten. The article quotes the historian Bernard Degen, according to whom prices rose during the war while wages stayed the same, causing workers and employees to lose about one fifth of their income. ↩
3. Bernard Degen, “Grève générale” (Landesstreik), in: HLS (French version), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/016533/. The article mentions the strike of bank employees in Zurich on 30 September and 1 October 1918, the deployment of troops in Zurich on 7 November and the clashes on 10 November. ↩
4. Fuchs, “Klassenkampf”, SRF News, 2017, https://www.srf.ch/news/klassenkampf-als-in-zuerich-die-banker-streikten; on the loss of members in the 1920s see the Sozialarchiv finding aid Ar 481, https://www.findmittel.ch/archive/archNeu/Ar481.html. ↩
5. Wikipedia, “Landesstreik”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landesstreik, on the foundation of the Oltener Aktionskomitee in February 1918 as a link between the party and the trade unions, initially directed against a planned universal civilian service obligation. ↩
6. Degen, “Grève générale” (HLS, French version), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/016533/, on the troops in Zurich on 7 November, the protest strike of 9 November, the Zurich events of 10 November and the proclamation of the general strike; Wikipedia, “Landesstreik”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landesstreik, on Wille’s memorandum of 4 November, the role of Emil Sonderegger and the gathering of about 7,000 people on 10 November. ↩
7. Degen, “Grève générale” (HLS, French version), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/016533/, on the number of strikers and the role of the railway workers. ↩
8. Wikipedia, “Landesstreik”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landesstreik, on troop numbers; the figure of 95,000 troops is also given by Abplanalp, Blog Nationalmuseum, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2018/11/landesstreik-1918/. ↩
9. Jorio, “Die Schweiz in der Krise – der Landesstreik von 1918”, Die Volkswirtschaft, 2018, https://dievolkswirtschaft.ch/de/2018/10/jorio-11-2018/. ↩
10. Andrej Abplanalp, “Der Landesstreik von 1918”, Blog Nationalmuseum, 12 November 2018 (updated 2025), https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2018/11/landesstreik-1918/, on the participants, the 95,000 troops, the end of the strike in the night of 13 to 14 November and the three deaths in Grenchen. ↩
11. Degen, “Grève générale” (HLS, French version), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/016533/, on the prosecutions and sentences. ↩
12. HLS, “Nobs, Ernst”, version of 3 June 2010, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/003669/2010-06-03/: Nobs (1886–1957) worked at the Volksrecht from 1915 to 1935, was elected to the Federal Council on 15 December 1943 as the first Social Democrat and headed the Federal Department of Finance and Customs from 1944 to 1951. ↩
13. Degen, “Grève générale” (HLS, French version), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/016533/, listing the demands: proportional representation, women’s suffrage, the 48-hour week, a state monopoly of foreign trade, old-age and disability insurance, a wealth tax, the organisation of food supply and military reform. ↩
14. Swissvotes, vote no. 93, “Vermögensabgabe”, short description, https://swissvotes.ch/vote/93.00/kurzbeschreibung-de.pdf: the Social Democratic initiative, submitted in September 1921, was rejected on 3 December 1922 by 87.0 per cent of voters and by all cantons, with a turnout of 86.3 per cent. ↩
15. Abplanalp, “Der Landesstreik von 1918”, Blog Nationalmuseum, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2018/11/landesstreik-1918/, and Wikipedia, “Landesstreik”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landesstreik, section on consequences. ↩
16. Degen, “Grève générale” (HLS, French version), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/016533/. ↩
17. James, speech of 21 June 2007, https://www.snb.ch/public/publication/en/www-snb-ch/publications/communication/speeches/2007/ref_20070621_hja/publications0_en/ref_20070621_hja.en.pdf. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.