“I hope it doesn’t pass, I don’t think its good for Switzerland at all,” ABB CEO Joe Hogan said in an interview today. “For multinational companies like ABB, we have to attract and retain the best talent in the world. If that inhibits us, and I think this initiative could, that’s a problem.”

Opposition to excessive executive pay has been building in Switzerland, even though the country has the highest average monthly wage in Europe. Minder and Moser-Harder say payouts such as the 71 million francs of shares that Dougan, Credit Suisse’s CEO, received in 2010 under an incentive program created five years earlier show how executive compensation has become disconnected from average salaries.

Top Salaries

At least five of Europe’s 20 highest-paid CEOs work for Swiss companies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The list includes three Americans, Dougan, Hogan and Joe Jimenez of Novartis AG, as well as Roche’s Austrian chief Schwan and Nestle’s Bulcke of Belgium.

Jimenez, Switzerland’s highest earning CEO, got 13.2 million Swiss francs in 2012 and Schwan received 12.5 million francs. That compares with an average of about 2.7 million euros (3.3 million francs) for CEOs of companies in Europe’s Stoxx 600 Index which have disclosed 2012 executive salaries, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Minder’s supporters see swollen salaries as an “Americanization” imported by investment bankers in the 1990s. The proposal has broad support among low- and middle-income earners and also among those with vocational training, Susanne Leutenegger Oberholzer, a Social Democratic Party lawmaker, said at a Jan. 31 press conference in Bern.

Liberal Laws

The plan would result in one of the world’s strictest laws on executive pay, according to Robert Kuipers, a partner in charge of remuneration services in PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Zurich office. The U.K., by comparison, has instituted a non- binding “say on pay” rules.

Switzerland would become less attractive to foreign multinationals such as offshore drilling contractor Transocean Ltd. and oilfield service company Weatherford International Ltd., which relocated because of liberal corporation laws, taxes and infrastructure, said Meinrad Vetter, an official at Economiesuisse, a lobby group for Swiss companies.

Economiesuisse has budgeted as much as 8 million francs on a campaign to block the initiative and backs a counter proposal from the government, which would automatically come into force next year if the Swiss people reject Minder’s law.