The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands has once again sided with the workers of the Tourist Centers against the management of the company, with a cascade of judgments that confirms what the staff had been denouncing and what, among other things, motivated the strike in the summer of 2017: that the management was violating not only the collective agreement, but also a judgment that the workers had already won on how that agreement should be applied.
In total, in recent days 17 rulings have been notified, which add to another one dictated last November that La Voz de Lanzarote had already advanced. And in all of them, the Court reproduces the arguments it used in that first judgment relating to one of the workers, so it is foreseeable that the dozens of lawsuits that are still pending resolution will do so in the same sense.
As for the first 18 judgments that have already been handed down, they correct the criteria of the Social Court, which in the first instance rejected the lawsuits, and confirm the right of workers to receive the amount corresponding to the availability, transportation and laundry bonuses that were not paid to them in the years 2015 and 2016. Thus, it condemns the Centers to pay them that sum -which is around 766 euros per worker-, in addition to the interest corresponding to the type of 10 percent per year.
"The personal supplement has nothing to do with it"
This conflict originated after the entry into force of the last collective agreement of the Centers. At that time, the management began to pay these three bonuses only in eleven payments, discounting the vacation month. However, the workers maintained that it was not what had been agreed in the agreement, where what was done was to prorate the corresponding amount in twelve payments, regardless of whether it was a vacation period or not.
There they went to the Courts for the first time and obtained a final judgment ruling in their favor. However, what the company did when executing that ruling was to start paying the bonuses in twelve payments, but at the same time reducing the amount of a personal supplement that workers receive under that agreement. In addition, they did not pay them the amounts owed for the bonuses of 2015 and 2016, alleging that it was already covered by what they had received from that personal supplement. For this reason, the workers filed new lawsuits, both for the reduction in the personal supplement since 2017 and for the amounts owed to them from previous years for the bonuses, and the latter are the ones that are being resolved now.
"The company has breached the judgment on this point and the personal supplement, which corresponds to another purpose, has nothing to do with it," the TSJC points out, thus overturning the theses that the management of the Centers has been defending. In fact, it emphasizes that this supplement "is made up of different remuneration concepts."
In this regard, it cites a letter that the company itself sent to the workers in its day, in which it is explained that the supplement "groups and fully replaces the concepts of seniority, March payment and October payment," and the Court points out that those are "concepts that have nothing to do with the transportation, laundry and availability bonus."
The company's argument "is not sustainable"
As for the other point raised by the management of the Centers and that both Echedey Eugenio and the president, Pedro San Ginés, have repeated, who alleged that what the workers were asking for would mean "a remuneration increase higher than that allowed by the General Budget Law," the TSJC responds that this argument "is not sustainable," since what the staff is claiming "is the correct application of the collective agreement," as had also been established by the judgment that the company was not complying with.
"It is assumed that when negotiating the collective agreement, the parties already took into account what was established by the budgetary legislation, and what is being claimed now is the application of what was agreed, which logically has to comply with the legal regulations," the TSJC emphasizes, which insists that "it is not claiming something new that comes to increase what was agreed, but it is claiming what was agreed, so there is no proper remuneration increase, but a breach of the collective agreement."
