The crowd gathered at the door. Everyone ordered to be quiet, but the screams did not stop. A man, whom no one knew, looked out the window to try to calm things down. Someone said that he was the head of human resources at Radio Televisión Española, but there was no way to confirm it. In another building on the Somosaguas Campus, no one dared to come out and give explanations; In another, a worker from a private security company said, “that’s all we can say,” and in another, a young man who worked as a logistics assistant said he was “very sorry.”
In short, nobody knew anything. More than five thousand applicants to occupy some of the 500 informant and communicator positions that the public entity calls for were on tenterhooks. In total, the opposition process calls for 1,470 positions for permanent staff. Curiously, in the age of digital information and with the probably highest concentration of journalists per square meter in the world, information flowed through rumors and screenshots.
A At 10:20 a.m. the image of the USO union began to hover. At that moment, thousands of journalists gather impatiently to start a multiple choice exam. Many have spent weeks or months of intense study, renunciations and poor sleep. The doors don’t open. The USO announcement is ignored, “it’s fake, we’re going to be where we are,” says Sergio, a journalist and documentary filmmaker who got up at dawn to drive from Malaga to Madrid.
Shortly after, the news appears in various media, the unions that have been offering support to opponents who are not even unionized for days do not deny the rumor on the phone. The doors are still not open, the exam was supposed to start at 11am, but it is obvious that this opposition will have the umpteenth delay.
Sorry for the inconvenience
At 10:57, an email arrives in the mailboxes with a brief message: “For reasons of force majeure, the Information and Content exam scheduled for today, September 29, 2024, has been postponed, and will be announced in the coming days. the new subpoena for evidence. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
The doors remain closed. At that moment, with everyone crowded together, all kinds of sensations emerge that reflect the human condition: a girl cries hysterically, a man of about 50 years old rereads the email as if trying to discover some hopeful design in that paragraph, a woman insults, the feelings grow. shouting, “We have to do something!”
The tension is palpable, there are dark circles and red eyes due to the theft of exams that have been delayed for more than three years. “We can’t just leave, we have to set fire to everything,” says a guy who is beside himself. But to what or who? The source of the problem is not there. Nobody knows how to pursue a cheating leak that has been revealed in time, but that, in the interests of justice, ends up robbing five thousand people at once.
Little by little, the crowd disperses. It is clear that if some information arrives it will not be physically, but via mobile phone. Tempers soften. It helps that, at every step, the opponents meet friends and colleagues who are nice to see. Collective grief appeases anger. But nothing changes, the doors remain closed.
Some are resigned, others leave enraged, others make jokes. But fatigue means that, in one hour, the thousands of opponents have left without completing a process for which, some, they have been preparing for years. This is the first major hiring process that the RTVE corporation has undertaken since 2007. There are well-known faces from television who hoped to consolidate their position after years of work. There are well-known faces from other media. There are journalists over 50 years old and young people who have just left university.
The long-awaited RTVE competitions have more than 21,000 applicants for a thousand places, the majority for the category of informant who has just suffered the umpteenth tragedy. The leak of the multiple choice exam questions reached the ears of unions and management who decided to cancel the exam, without proposing an alternative test or other solution to the 5,028 aspiring journalists. The case is already in the hands of Justice for attempting to violate the principle of objectivity in the Public Service.
Who pays the expenses
Juan comes from Portugalete, Carlos from Seville, César from Cantabria. Another couple coming from Granada spent the night in a hotel. Mónica, however, has it more difficult, she has traveled from Israel where she works for various media as a freelancer to take this interruptus exam. Your flight multiplies the expenses; but, above all, I have made him absent from work at a key moment, with the assassination of Nasrallah in Beirut.
Another boy explains that he has given up going to his own sister’s wedding, which was the night before in Valencia. But beyond the logistics of the trip to Madrid, RTVE affirms that the travel expenses will be reimbursed, there is the uncertainty and pain: after so much sacrifice, will it be of any use?
The academies dedicated to the preparation of opposition candidates estimate that the average to pass a selective process is between 12 and 24 months of preparation for normal opposition processes. But these are not normal oppositions. First, because they are not regular, they are not carried out periodically. In fact, a process on this scale has not been carried out since 2007. This translates into a fairly aged workforce in the corporation that has nearly seven thousand workers, in which interim or temporary workers represent around a third.
“We are cursed,” jokes Lidia, who comes from Córdoba to take the exam. It is not the first setback for oppositions that became official in 2022 after an agreement sealed in 2019. The public entity aspires to hire a thousand people. This affected the modification of its budget allocation, which must go through the Ministry of Finance and be validated by the Council of Ministers.
Once the call for opposition 1/2002 was obtained, there was a complaint that once again caused a delay of one year. The Social Chamber of the National Court (AN) invalidated the call in 2023 after a complaint from CGT, CCOO, UGT, Independent Union of Communication and Broadcasting (SICD) and Unión Sindical Obrera (USO), declaring the access requirements null and void. to the oppositions.
The oppositions required a “minimum experience” of one year, which violates the principle of equality. Finally, this summer a security breach was detected, RTVE itself reported the unauthorized download of data of the platform of their oppositions managed by the company CEGOS. This adds to the embarrassing episode of the exam canceled this Sunday due to the leak of the questions.
An immobilizing system
That the unions promoted the paralysis of a process that they have been demanding for years is very symptomatic of the internal dynamics of an entity that, often, are far from being resolved politically and are more due to internal power flows and disagreements between the unions themselves. unions.
The management of the Corporation, represented in the Advisory Council and its presidentthey make a large part of the decisions jointly with the unions as a symmetrical counterpart. This means that each step of the entity comes from eternal negotiations and compensations. This was not the case due to the leak of the exam, since, officially, the decision to cancel the test on the 29th was unanimously adopted by the unions and management.
The leak of 83 of the 100 exam questions is full of unknowns. The popular and informal verdict that emerged from the first conversations, the groups of opponents on Sunday the 29th is that, “the jury is going to lose their hair.” The jury is responsible for preparing the test, which is the great filter for the thousands of applicants.
Sources from the unions themselves explain over the phone that there will be a new call, but “not before a month,” since the following weekends are committed to other competitions for other positions. The National Police vans accessed the Torre España studios at the end of the morning. They did have to open the doors to the police.
Source: www.vozpopuli.com
