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INPRIMATU
TC puts the "freedom" of companies before workers' health
  • The Spanish Constitutional Court has endorsed the dismissal for leave to work, even if it was justified. He has responded to the complaint of a Catalan worker who was dismissed for not going to work in nine days.
Juan Mari Arregi 2019ko urriaren 31

The CT has used an article of labor reform to stop absenteeism in the Guipuzkoan plant. According to this article, dismissal due to objective cause of a worker, with compensation of 20 days per year worked, that is, if during two consecutive months it fails in 20% of the days or in 25% in four months. The court therefore considers the dismissal of a person who is not going to work in these quantities of days to be legal.

The decision has not been unanimously adopted, but one of the Constitutional conclusions is that the right to work has a limit: “Freedom of the company and defence of its productivity”. This statement coincides with the labor reform of the PP and the PSOE, but what is worse, also means approving the thesis of the wildest capitalism in the field of justice, putting the freedom of the company above the health of the work.

The sentence also discriminates according to gender, as it is women who suffer twice as much work as men: wage earners and caregivers. This seriously impairs your health. It is no coincidence that a woman on the jury does not agree with the decision.

We would not fall into the scaremongering if we were to say that a capitalism that has “a project of the future that is clearly criminal,” as the Madrid writer and professor Carlos Taibo recently underlined. The ruling of the Constitutional Court is in that direction.