On the last day of the broadcast of and after a long ten-hour negotiation, Barça TV has sealed an agreement with the club and with Telefónica for the blaugrana entity to hire 14 workers from the television channel and “substantially” improve the compensation of the rest of workers (80) who lose their job with the closure of the chain.
This is how Col·lectiu Ronda explained it this Friday. The agreement has been closed after a tense meeting of ten hours. In this way, the 14 contracted will become part of Barça Produccions, where they will continue to carry out work related to the communication of the Barça club and the generation of digital and multimedia content. The club thus avoids the complaint from the Barça TV works council.
Last April, the Barça club announced that it was going to close its television channel. Barça claimed that, for economic reasons, it was forced to cancel the contract with Telefónica that it had signed since 2015. The closure of Barça TV affected 120 professionals, including contractors and collaborators.
The decision was part of the cuts that are being carried out at the club to comply with the demands of LaLiga in terms of financial fair play. The last broadcast, as stipulated in the contract with Telefónica, will be today, June 30. Barça TV, therefore, puts an end to 27 years of broadcasting.
The channel workers, who had been fighting for months to improve their working conditions, received the news with disagreement. Since then, negotiations began to avoid the closure of the channel and the dismissal of its workers. The Barça TV staff asked the club to participate firsthand in the process of negotiating the collective dismissal file.
The lawyers for the Barça TV staff urged the club to be present in the negotiations to find solutions to the dismissals. Col·leciu Ronda -responsible for legally advising the workers- announced yesterday, June 29, that the Barça TV staff were going to sue both the club and Telefónica for the collective dismissal, since they considered that there had been an illegal transfer of workers.
This agreement was reached just one day before the deadline for negotiations expired and the majority of Barça TV workers voted in favor of the pact.
