Jasmin Eicher has already axed her sole full-time employee to keep afloat her shop selling cards, candles and paper in a Zurich suburb. If Switzerland approves what would be the world’s highest minimum wage, she says the only option would be to close her door.The Swiss will vote in a national referendum on May 18 on whether to create a minimum wage of 22 francs ($25) per hour, or 4,000 francs a month. While about 90 per cent of workers in Switzerland already earn more than that, employers say setting Switzerland’s first national wage floor would push up salaries throughout the economy. When adjusted for currency and purchasing power, it would be the highest minimum in the world.“We couldn’t pay it,” said Eicher. The employee she let go earned 3,500 francs a month. Now she’s by herself, working 10 hours a day, six days a week. “Of course I understand about people not earning enough, but not everyone is worth 4,000 francs. Here in Switzerland we’re already so well-off,” she said.The chief backers of the proposal are Switzerland’s biggest trade unions, which argue that pay levels need to reflect the country’s prices — among the world’s highest. A poll by researcher gfs.bern released April 11 said 52 per cent of voters may reject it, while Leger research firm last month found the same percentage would vote yes.About 10 per cent of Switzerland’s fulltime workforce receive a pretax wage of less than 4,000 francs, according to a report for 2010. When adjusted for purchasing power, the Swiss proposed wage would amount to $14.01 an hour. That’s more than the minimum wages in Luxembourg and France, at $10.60, and Australia at $10.20, according to 2012 data from the OECD.With income inequality growing among developed economies, according to the OECD, minimum wages are on the table in other countries as well. In the UK, PM David Cameron has increased it to £6.5 ($10.88) per hour. In the US, President Barack Obama is pushing for an increase in the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum to $10.10, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet backed a national minimum of €8.50.George Sheldon, professor of economics at the University of Basel, said the Swiss proposal would be counter-productive: “Unemployment among the unskilled is increasing. The solution to their problem can’t be to make them more expensive.”National referendums, a key element of Switzerland’s political system, are held four times a year. In a country that’s home to about 300 banks, voters often side with employers. In 2012, for instance, they voted down a proposal to require employers to offer six weeks of paid vacation. Last year, though, voters approved the so-called fat-cat initiative, which gave shareholders a binding vote on managers’ pay and blocked big severance packages. They did reject a measure to limit executives’ pay to 12 times that of junior employees.Despite being home to multinational corporations such as Nestle and drugmaker Novartis, Switzerland gets two-thirds of its employment from small and medium-sized enterprises. The Association of Swiss Cleaning Companies, Allpura, opposes the minimum wage, saying it would lead to job cuts and worse working conditions. It says employees in the sector earn between 18.50 francs and 26.50 francs per hour.Big companies including Nestle, Novartis and Swatch are against the measure too, saying it will hurt the economy. “State intervention in the liberal economic system also goes against the market economy principles of our society that have been so successful to date,” Novartis spokesman Dermot Doherty said. At Nestle, the wages of all Swiss employees are above the proposed minimum, spokesman Philippe Aeschlimann said. “A higher cost of labour would however affect companies in our supply chain and our Swiss customers,” he said.Some retail chains pay less than 4,000 francs a month and have refused to sign collective agreements, representatives of the campaign’s supporters said in Bern in February. The wage would be indexed for inflation. “I’m for it and I’ll vote yes,” said Cecile Steinemann, a 23-year-old student in Zurich.Germany, where wages are mostly negotiated at the industry level, is one of only seven EU countries with no minimum wage, according to Eurostat. Corrected for purchasing power, Switzerland’s planned minimum would work out to about €2,500 a month, more than the €1,921 in Luxembourg and €1,502 in Belgium, the bloc’s two highest in early 2014.“A minimum wage won’t stop poverty,” said Economy Minister Johann Schneider-Ammann. “This new system could be counterproductive.” According to Boris Zuercher, head of the Employment Directorate at the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, the uniform wage would get passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and will ultimately result in job losses among low-wage earners.Workers earning between 4,000 and 6,000 francs a month — 40 per cent of the full-time workforce — will seek higher pay too, he said. “The main criticism is that it’s an enormously high minimum wage — it would be the highest internationally,” Zuercher said. “It’s not a question of Novartis or UBS not being able to afford to pay 4,000 francs, but some little company in a remote valley.”By contrast, Paul Rechsteiner, a Social Democrat MP and a member of the initiative’s committee, says, it’s short-sighted for the government to allow people to be poorly paid. “It’s a bad situation if wages are paid on which you can’t live in Switzerland.” As for Eicher, she says the proposal has one bright side. If it passes and her shop folds, she could imagine working someplace else — with a guaranteed minimum income. “It’ll be great to be an employee,” she said.