Counted Here, Missing There: Seasonal Workers in Zschokke’s “Swiss- made” Infrastructure

Under the seasonal permit regime, formalized in 1931 and mobilized extensively after the Second World War, the Swiss construction industry imported cheap labor (approximately 60% of all construction workers held this permit) to manage production on a massive number of infrastructure construction sites operating simultaneously across the country. Motivated by a drive for infrastructural self- reliance, Switzerland built at unprecedented scale, speed, and efficiency. This paper centers on the seasonal workers who built Switzerland’s mid-twentieth-century infrastructural landscape. Working with the archives of one of the country’s largest contractors, Conrad Zschokke SA, the archival investigation reveals how these workers were invisibilised through bureaucratic procedures, biased statistical calculations, and the demeaning use of terms such as “unskilled” or “temporary”. Despite the archives’ sheer size, only a narrow paper trail of this heritage remains within the company’s employee administrative tabs, bearing the traces of these migrant workers’ role on the construction site. By examining the administrative apparatuses of government and the company, the paper presents stories that aim to restore these seasonal workers’ authorship, foregrounding their skills, power, and agency in shaping the construction of a “Swiss-made” nation.

Whereas architecture histories have relegated contractors and their labor force to the margins, this paper argues for the centrality of migrant seasonal work in shaping the twentieth-century built environment. By treating their tacit knowledge as a material force - traceable across permit files, unemployment statistics, documentation, and placement offices records - the paper recovers part of their contribution and reframes “Swiss-made” as not only the outcome of Swiss but rather of mobile migrant seasonal labor.