Julia Gerber Rüegg

Portrait photo by Julia Gerber Rüegg, October 2013

Julia Gerber Rüegg (born April 8, 1957 in Zurich ) is a Swiss politician ( SP ) and trade unionist.

Live and act

Julia Gerber Rüegg grew up in Uerikon . She attended the secondary school for girls in Stadelhofen in Zurich. In 1979 she acquired the teacher's license and worked at primary and secondary schools until 1989. Later she trained as a PR consultant. Until 2008 she headed the Rüegg Gerber PR agency in Wädenswil . She then worked as media spokesperson for the Unia union in Bern and, from 2010, head of the contract execution department at Unia, Zurich-Schaffhausen region. She currently heads the Eastern Switzerland Graubünden region at the Syndicom telecommunications union.

Julia Gerber Rüegg is married to Willy Rüegg, mother of two sons (* 1989 and 1991) and lives in Wädenswil.

Political offices

Julia Gerber Rüegg has been involved in the Social Democratic Party since 1980. In 1987 she was elected to the Wädenswil municipal council and in 1994 to the Zurich cantonal council. In the local council she presided over the spatial planning commission. In the Cantonal Council she was a member of various special commissions, the business audit commission (1995–2002) and the finance commission (2002–2009). From 2010 to 2014 she was a member of the Commission for Economy and Taxes. In 2005 she was elected to the Commission for Equality between Women and Men by the Government Council. Gerber Rüegg's core political issues are equality between men and women in work and society as well as the rights and protection of employees .

On behalf of the University of Zurich , Gerber Rüegg founded the “Pitschi crèche”, the first day-care center for children of studying parents at the University of Zurich (opening: May 2003). She initiated the establishment of the “Childcare in the Zurich University Area kihz” foundation of the two Zurich universities.

Julia Gerber Rüegg is networked in trade union circles through her job and voluntary work. 2008–2014 she was President of the Zurich Trade Union Federation.

In spring 2014, Julia Gerber Rüegg resigned from the Zurich Cantonal Council and enabled Jonas Erni to move up to the Cantonal Council a year before the elections and give her party a strategic advantage in the election campaign.

National politics

During her time on the Zurich Cantonal Council, Julia Gerber Rüegg took on more and more offices at national level. From 2004 to 2012 she was a member of the management of the SP Switzerland when she chaired the SP Women Switzerland together with the Geneva National Councilor Maria Roth-Bernasconi .

During her career, Julia Gerber Rüegg campaigned for the SP in the Swiss parliamentary elections several times. In the 1990s it started at the bottom of the list, but in 2011 the SP nominated it for a promising place. In doing so, she moved from 11th to 8th place on the list (first replacement place), and thus could not move into the National Council.

In May 2015, the search committee of the SP Canton of Zurich caused a sensation by surprisingly deciding not to list Julia Gerber Rüegg for the 2015 National Council elections. After she had already been refused to slip into the National Council a month earlier, after Jacqueline Fehr was elected to the Zurich government council, Julia Gerber Rüegg had been combative to the media and referred to her electoral mandate from 2011. At the delegates' meeting of the SP Canton of Zurich, the motion to put Gerber Rüegg back on the list was accepted with a three-quarters majority. Regardless of her election result in 2008, she was only listed in the middle of the list. The fact that the party leadership suddenly turned away from Gerber Rüegg was met with astonishment by the media, which unexpectedly gave them an early start to the election campaign.

Feminism, Family and Equality

On June 7, 1993, Julia Gerber Rüegg submitted the application to the revision of the Wädenswil municipal code: “The feminine form is used in this text for names of persons, functions and roles. Since the masculine form is contained in the feminine, both the masculine and the feminine person are addressed. " The Council approved this request. «On September 26th, a vote was taken in Wädenswil on the revision of the municipal code. This was the first time that a template was submitted to the people in Switzerland that contained exclusively female personal names. It triggered heated discussions in broad circles of the population, both about linguistic equality and about equality in general. " As expected, the bill was rejected, but sparked a debate in the entire German-speaking area about how to deal with the generic masculine, and aroused international interest. On February 20, 1994, a new bill using the "pair form" was clearly adopted. Since then, official texts and legal texts in Switzerland are no longer formulated exclusively in male terms.

Gerber Rüegg's commitment to women in work and the compatibility of work and family has repeatedly led her to political advances in the Cantonal Council. As president of the trade union federation, she launched the popular initiative “Kinderbetreuung JA!”, Which aimed to expand the range of childcare options for preschoolers. In June 2010, the Zurich electorate approved the counterproposal, thereby guaranteeing the right to a childcare place in addition to the family.

Web links

• Literature by and about Julia Gerber Rüegg in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Julia Gerber Rüegg in the catalog of the Informationsverbund Deutschschweiz
• Julia Gerber Rüegg on the website of the Zurich Cantonal Council

Individual evidence

1. ^ Website of the Parliamentary Services of the Canton of Zurich. Retrieved March 6, 2011.
2. ^ Website of the Zurich Trade Union Federation. Retrieved March 6, 2011.
3. ^ Website of the SP Women Switzerland. Retrieved May 17, 2013.
4. ↑ Candidate list of the SP Canton Zurich  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from April 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ↑ Julia Gerber Rüegg disavowed by her party. Neue Zürcher Zeitung .
7. ↑ SP snubs deserved comrade. In: Tages-Anzeiger .
8. ^ [1] Tele Züri from May 30, 2015
9. ^ City of Wädenswil: Minutes of the municipal council of June 7, 1993. Wädenswil 1993, pp. 668–670.
10. ^ Department for Equality Issues of the Canton of Zurich (Ed.) Sprache Macht Politik , Zurich 1994.
11. ↑ Among other things, the Japanese linguist Saburo Okamura from Waseda University in Tokyo published on the subject of Wädenswil and Eutin: How the generic feminine came and went. In: Waseda Global Forum. Vol. 1, pp. 47-59.