Eldiario.es has reported the judgment. The telecommunications company Zener Plus, based in Bizkaia, installs and maintains telecommunications networks for the More Mobile and Vodafone operators. The company began dismissing workers as soon as the first state of alarm of the pandemic began. The CCOO trade union has denounced the facts and the High Court has condemned the company to readmit the 65 workers affected and to pay the wages that were not paid while they were out of the company.

CCOO says that it was hard for them to know the layoffs: “The information provided by the company is always very limited, it has to be underlined a lot. Because of the kind of work that is done, installers are not many in the center, so we almost began to know through rumors that many contract extinctions were taking place.”

According to the judgment, the company was obliged to process and negotiate a collective dismissal from a significant number of redundancies, but it did not. Instead, individual redundancies were made, claiming that the performance of the workers was reduced and that the persons participating in the trial period did not exceed this stage. The judges recall that the ban on objective dismissals caused by the pandemic was regularized at the time when the company made redundancies and opened up the possibility of starting an employment regulation dossier. In particular, three days after the company made the 65 redundancies, the company submitted a request for an end to the death penalty.