The Social Chamber of the Supreme Court has handed down the second conviction in less than two weeks against the Public Radio and Television Agency of Andalusia (RTVA) and its subsidiary Canal Sur Radio y Televisión SA (Canal Sur) for violation of the right to strike of one of its workers in the territorial center of Córdoba on International Women’s Day, in this case in 2022, during which the CGT organization had formally called for a general strike at the autonomous level.
The judgment, dated October 30, rejects the appeal of RTVA and Canal Sur, as requested by the public prosecutor, and declares final the judgment of the Social Chamber of the TSJA (of July 2022) which has already declared the right to strike of a video operator/editor, CGT delegate, following the establishment of working hours for March 8, 2022.
This is the second judgment, in less than two weeks, in which the High Court rules against RTVA in the same terms after that reported by this newspaper, in which the replacement for the usual host of a public radio program of Cordoba obeyed “This is a commercial decision clearly aimed at undermining the legitimate exercise of the right to strike and showing third parties and the general public the least impact of the union protest by maintaining the broadcast of the program on the air.” Precisely last Monday, the channel had to read the judgment live, as required by the sentence:
The judgment ratified by the Supreme Court in this second case has already condemned the defendants to pay the CGT, legally advised by the Andalusian cooperative Autonomía Sur, compensation for moral damage of 7,500 euros and also to proceed to the reading of the judgment in the afternoon news of Canal Sur Televisión, something that will probably happen in the near future. From now on, RTVA and Canal Sur are also ordered to pay the costs of their appeal, up to 1,500 euros.
Their strike “had no impact on the assembly”
Canal Sur delivers to workers, approximately on the 25th of each month, the work quadrants for the following month. The proven facts, already proven in first instance, indicate that in the quadrant of the month of March 2022, on March 8, the worker presented himself in the afternoon shift, with also two special shifts planned (from 12:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.) assigned to another video operator/editor and to an electronics engineer who generally also performs editing functions.
The employee protagonist of this case and editor-in-chief supported the strike of March 8 at the territorial center of Canal Sur in Cordoba. In 2021, the operator did not support the strike, without the competing circumstances being noted, but its 2022 strike “had no impact on the editing of the newspaper”, since “the duration of the special team , which covers part of the morning and part of the afternoon, this allowed the editing of the two television news programs by the people who made these trips.
In the defendant company, several special teams are planned, in which participate “regularly and normally”, and which generally deal with both staff absences for various reasons, as well as any events or special events that may arise, and both the TSJA that now the Supreme Court has considered that the right to strike of the video operator/editor had been violated due to the establishment of working hours for March 8, 2022.
