30 years ago it was a good place to work but difficult for foreigners; bad enough the attitude between the Swiss Germans and the Romaine let alone the Swiss Italians (there were none iirc in Swissair). My wife couldn’t hack the racism especially after our 5 year old daughter was beaten up at kindergarten by a group of boys in front of the teacher and came home to ask me what auslander pack meant- foreign scum.
23% of the pilot force were foreigners in 1980; direct entry captains had long ceased and eventually Crossair was built up to undermine the SR pilot force employment conditions and being based at Basel could ignore the Swiss employment criteria.
I was one of the last group of foreigners; the largest part of which were English speaking but no requirement for German - Swiss German isn’t German with a Zurich accent.
Years later as one of the few English that spoke Swiss German after some very personal private lessons one of the chiefs said they would never recruit Brits again.
The flying and training was miles above BA standards as were the conditions- at the time of my interview we could afford to go out for a meal once a year..we didn’t get compensation for our previous experience due to some Dutch ex klm flight school guys but starting salary was double my BA 7 year one and a British captain said that I should be able to take my family out to eat 5 times a week on that. I didn’t really believe him but after a year I was renting a house for around chf2,500 a month. Certainly is a beautiful country and at this old age having had my wife the victim of crime yet again in france I would appreciate living in a police state even if I had to listen to Hals krankheit although at one time I dreamt in it.