Two and a half years later After Francina Armengol expelled 2,500 guards from the job sites of public hospitals in the Balearic Islands because they did not have a Catalan degree, the court ruled in the first instance that this decision was against the law and forced the Health Service to readmit them.
The Palma court ruled in favor of the guards who had filed a class action against the socialist government in January 2021, through the Florit Abogados firm, after being excluded from the update of the single employment pool by not accrediting a B1 degree of knowledge of the Catalan language.
What happened is that many workers were already registered in the general pool before Health requested a “cut” (update) of the pool. The surprise It was when the employees went to bring their merits and the administration evaluated them with a new linguistic criterion (requesting a B1), they were dismissed.
However, the judgment of September 2, 2024, to which ABC had access, considers that the previous Balearic government formed by the PSOE, the nationalists of Més and Podemos, violated the acquired rights of these workers by modifying the requirements after the fact. It maintains that it is not possible to impose new requirements on candidates who were already part of a pool because they already met the required requirements. initially during a call.
The Chamber therefore annuls the IB-Salut resolution in which they were expelled and recognizes the right of these guards to be admitted to the final pool of persons admitted. There is an appeal against this sentence before the High Court of Justice of the Balearic Islands (TSJB) and it will be the current executive of Marga Prohens, who removed the language requirement in health care upon coming to power, who will decide whether to appeal this judicial decision against the guards.
“Many colleagues have left for the peninsula because of the imposition of Catalan and others have not worked for years,” complain those affected by Armengol’s language policy. The guards’ discussions are getting heated and they agree that the news comes too late for many. The plaintiffs are cautiously accommodating this judgment while waiting for the decision of the Ministry of Health, now of the PP, and although they recognize that it is a “legacy of the previous Armengo Governmentl”, the current executive now has in its hands “to render them justice”. None of them wished to make a public statement while waiting for the Director General of the Health Service to speak and they even asked him to meet them.
As ABC moved forward, in the summer of 2021, Health held a merit competition to create a pool of interim candidates so that “new candidates could register and registered candidates could include new merits,” the call states, to which about 7,000 candidates applied. In November, the resolution was issued in which 2,500 workers were laid offeven though many of them were already on the stock exchange in 2018 as temporary workers. The complainants were excluded because it was considered that they did not demonstrate the necessary level of language training (B1), a level higher than that provided for in the Resolution requesting the exchange (A2). “It surprised us all. ‘Is this how they pay us for the effort of these two years of pandemic?’”, lamented one of the most experienced guards, who found himself unemployed despite having worked as a guard for 17 years.
The complaint, filed by the law firm Florit Abogados, states that knowledge of Catalan “cannot be a reason for exclusion from the selection procedure, and even less so in the case of personnel already registered”. “This generates clear legal uncertainty for the persons concerned, in this case excluded from the single list due to the a posteriori and rigorous application of a requirement not previously required or at least relaxed in its application or requirement“, argued lawyer Ernesto Florit, who did not question the language policy but rather focused on the fact that this job bank was open for the updating of merits and for new incorporations; However, “what happened is that people were fired, which was unforeseen. “That is where the heart of the demand lies.”
