An agreement to promote Catalan in the organic supermarket chain Ecoveritas has avoided the trial of a dismissal for linguistic reasons.
The victim is a girl who worked at the Puigcerdà establishment, and who reported that she had been kicked out to speak Catalan.
Now, Plataforma per la Llengua and Ecoveritas have reached an agreement through which the company has committed to labeling its products in Catalan and offering linguistic awareness courses to its staff.
The worker, who will receive compensation because she preferred not to return to her job, sees it as “a victory of principles.” The Intersindical, which has supported him, says that despite this progress there is still “a lot of work to do” in defense of the language.
The young woman says that she started working at the establishment in February, and that she was fired about two months later (in mid-March). When she had been in the supermarket for about fifteen days, she explains that she received a notice saying that “if I did not speak in Spanish to anyone who spoke to me in this language, they would fire me.”
The employee explains that, in fact, this rule would have been put in place when she had just been working (and attributes it to disagreements with a co-worker).
After she was fired, Plataforma per la Llengua released an audio in which, according to the entity, the supermarket manager “acknowledged that he had been fired for linguistic reasons” after two workers, posing as customers ” complained that the worker responded to them in Catalan when they had spoken in Spanish”.
The case led to a lawsuit for unfair dismissal that was due to go to trial this Tuesday in Social Court 3 of Girona. But a last-minute agreement has averted the hearing. As reported by Plataforma per la Llengua, the agreement between the entity, Ecoveritas and the worker states that the supermarket chain will promote Catalan, and will apply these changes during 2024.
Specifically, Ecoveritas has agreed to label its products in Catalan (both those of the Veritas brand and those of Viridis), will increase the presence of the language on all its social networks (50% of the content it publishes will be in Catalan) and will offer language awareness and management courses for the workforce.
To ensure that these agreements are met, the organic supermarket chain will appoint an interlocutor. Plataforma per la Llengua also celebrates that, prior to the pact, Ecoveritas has already “introduced Catalan in its purchase tickets.”
As for the worker, the company has agreed to compensate the worker because she does not want her job back (because, as she explains, the work environment would be strained).
The affected person celebrates that Ecoveritas has committed to Catalan and sees it as a “victory of principles.” “If everyone does their small part, we will be able to live fully in Catalan in Catalonia,” she explains.
“Ecoveritas has truly become an example for many companies,” he says in reference to the linguistic commitments it signed. “I am happy to have been able to fight for what I believed in, and having achieved it makes me very excited; it is a small example of a happy ending,” says the worker.
This morning, after the pact, the Intersindical held a rally to support the girl in front of the Girona Palace of Justice (where the social courts are located).
There, the spokesperson for the union in Girona, Àngels Torrents, thanked the worker for “the dignity” and regretted that, although this case could have been satisfactorily resolved, there is still a lot of work to do.
“Apart from what the regulations say, Catalan makes us unite as workers and as companies,” Torrents stated. “We find many spaces where speaking is prevented, even within the administration itself; therefore, what we want is to ask that anyone who detects that this right is being violated, not to give up,” concluded the Intersindical spokesperson. .
