Absolute disability. At the age of 40, X is not fit to work at any job and must receive a pension indefinitely. This is determined by the National Institute of Social Security (INSS) in a resolution about a worker – who asks to remain anonymous – after working for exactly two years and four months at the CCC company, which since from the Glòries tower in Barcelona moderates content for the North American Meta, on Facebook and Instagram.
This man, from a Central European country, joined the company at the beginning of 2019 as a video and image filter. Over time, the hardness of the material that had to be removed grew. X began to suffer symptoms compatible with post-traumatic stress, with intense visual and acoustic flashbacks, depressed mood, headaches, dizziness, persistent insomnia, recurrent nightmares and severe social isolation with a serious negative impact on his normal functioning that lead to prolonged absence from work. As the period of temporary leave expired, the worker’s legal defense, performed by Joan Josep Gimeno, of Coronas Advocats, requested absolute disability resulting from a work accident for X, which was granted by the INSS after the favorable opinion of a medical court.
As is common in these cases, the INSS has set a date from which X’s state of health can be reviewed. From July, he will be summoned again before the medical court to issue a new opinion.
An investigation by La Vanguardia revealed in October that nearly 400 workers at the CCC headquarters in Barcelona were on sick leave mainly affected by the content they had to filter and also by the working conditions. Many of them, collectively or individually, have several legal proceedings open against CCC. One of them, by criminal means, for alleged social crimes, injuries due to serious imprudence and against moral integrity.
A report from the Labor Inspectorate points out that until September 2020 the company lacked a psychosocial risk assessment system, so that, from his recruitment, about twenty months, X was without an analysis of the health effects of everything he saw. CCC had a wellness area for staff rest and psychological assistance 24 hours a day, but numerous workers interviewed by La Vanguardia in the autumn explained that they were generally short talks with the psychologist before returning to the horror of the Nets.
X has other files open against CCC: civil liability, for contesting the surcharge on benefits and a judicial procedure for the determination of contingency; that is, if your illness stems from a common illness or a work accident. The Labor Inspectorate determined that it was the second, but the company challenged it before the social courts, which have set the trial for February 2025.
As La Vanguardia published in January, the Social Court 28 of Barcelona already confirmed the Labor Inspectorate’s decision in the case of another CCC moderator, considering the contingency derived from an occupational accident.
After having worked since 2000 in the finance, communications and energy areas of the government of his country, X decided to move to Barcelona in 2013 to work in a banking institution. Months later, the organization moved its offices to Brussels, but X had already made his life in Barcelona, ??so he was left without a job. Through a friend, in 2018 he heard about an offer to moderate Facebook and Instagram content. At the end of that year, he went to a job interview that lasted “about seven minutes”, he explains to this newspaper.
After a two-week training, in which they barely faced hard images, he started working, on the night shift, and demonstrated a very high efficiency. X speaks several languages. In addition to the very hard content, it was affected by the pace imposed by the managers. CCC moderators have to mark around 400 tickets a day, that is, decide whether a video is publishable or not.
One night, X made more than a thousand. “I ended up exhausted, I didn’t even know what I was marking.” Without going into details: X was particularly affected by extremely harsh pedophilia videos.
Now he has just had his first child and his cries bring him back to the time of CCC. “There are things I can’t get out of my head. If I hear the baby’s cries, I reconnect with everything, it’s very hard”.
The man, in any case, tries to look ahead. I would like to train in the creation of online businesses, although at the moment, with significant problems of concentration and attention, I do not feel capable. If the evolution were positive, the medical court could reduce the incapacity to total, which would allow him to work in a sector other than content moderation.
Recently, the X and CCC have reached an agreement to disengage.
