The High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has declared valid the dismissal of a worker who dedicated an hour daily during her working hours to reading and publishing messages with her mobile phone on WhatsApp and Instagram.
The ruling, made public this Thursday, confirms a previous ruling issued in July 2024 by the Social Court number 6 of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which dismissed the lawsuit filed by the worker against the cleaning company that fired her.
In the dismissal letter, several reasons were adduced, but the fundamental ones were lack of punctuality in arriving at work, repeated absences exceeding ten minutes and "continuous use of the personal phone during the workday, with repeated access to Instagram and WhatsApp", despite the fact that her contract stipulated that this was a non-permitted practice, "except for very justified reasons".
Regarding this last point, it detailed that she had been subjected to surveillance that revealed that, in three months, she had dedicated 21 hours and 41 minutes of her workday to connecting to networks with her mobile phone, a statement that was reinforced by documentary evidence of some Instagram messages published from her workplace.
The employee alleged in her defense that the use of the mobile phone at work had been something tolerated and that no one had reprimanded her for doing it, until they rescinded her contract.
However, the TSJC does not accept his arguments and endorses the reasons for which the judge who examined the case in the first instance ruled that his dismissal had been fair.
