Isolated, without contact with her colleagues, stripped of duties and without material to work with. This is the working reality that a worker at the Moroccan Consulate in the Canary Islands says she has been experiencing for a year. This employee, a local agent (hired under Spanish labour regulations), has filed a lawsuit for substantial modification of her working conditions and for violation of fundamental rights and is claiming compensation of 20,000 euros for the moral damages she claims to have suffered due to this alleged case of workplace harassment.
The trial was scheduled for last Thursday, but has been postponed until early December. It will not be the only one that the Moroccan Consulate will have to deal with around that time. A month earlier, it will have to respond to the claim of another worker, also a local agent, who was stripped of his duties as cashier, maintenance and updating of files and liaison with centres that accommodate unaccompanied minors by the current consul, Fatiha El Kamouri, to become her driver.
The trial of this first employee was also suspended in April. The lawyer of the Moroccan Consulate then offered the plaintiff a settlement with two alternatives: terminate the contract and compensate him with 55,000 euros (more than he is claiming for moral damages) or reinstate him as a driver with a schedule from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The local agent rejected this because he wants to go to court to try to prove that there was workplace harassment by the consul.
The second applicant has been working at the Moroccan Consulate for four years. With a background in commerce and marketing, she began by performing administrative duties, first in the Civil Registry and then at the reception desk, processing passports.
After the arrival of the current consul in September 2022, this employee took on more duties, including issuing certificates and cash and accounting duties, replacing the first complainant. And it was at that moment that, according to the agent, what she describes as “humiliating and degrading treatment” began. In the complaint, she recounts several episodes. She maintains that the consul told her that she had to go to work on weekends, even though her job is facing the public and the Consulate is only open from Monday to Friday. According to the plaintiff’s account, after her complaint, she ordered her “to start bringing old computers up to the second floor,” where the archive is located.
She also says that on that first Saturday she was “forbidden to leave the consulate even to eat” until five in the afternoon and that when she left “she fainted at the door,” so she had to be transferred to a medical center.
The following weekend, the worker announced that she would not be going to the centre, as her contract stipulated that her workday was from Monday to Friday. The local agent claims that the consul reproached her for wanting to work under Spanish regulations, that she even questioned her qualifications and that she went so far as to accuse her of leaking confidential information from the Consulate “without specifying to whom, how or when”.
Less than two months after El Kamouri’s arrival, the worker was placed on long-term medical leave. She returned to work at the end of July last year, being transferred to the third floor of the consular building, to the notary’s office.
According to her account, the vice-consul told her that she would be performing “material inventory” duties. However, from that moment on, the worker has been placed “at an empty desk, without a computer, with an unplugged telephone, without any kind of material and absolutely deprived of any functions.” The plaintiff also claims that she has been prohibited from going up to the fifth floor, where the kitchen and office are located, so that “she cannot heat up food and has to eat at her own table.”
In the aforementioned letter, she states that she has been prohibited from speaking to her colleagues and that she has been warned that the security cameras have audio, so “in addition to seeing her, they can hear her.”
The employee says, for example, that due to this isolation, she was locked in the Consulate at the beginning of April because no one had told her that it was closing earlier than usual that day.
Recently, the employee received a written response from the consul to her request that she be given duties and materials. In this response, El Kamouri states that the local agent’s duties are linked to the control of the staff and the work of the cleaning company, as well as the inventory and replenishment of cleaning products or the custody of the documentation relating to this service. Regarding the materials, the employee claims that she was only provided with three pens and a blue highlighter.
At the time of filing the complaint (early June), four of the six local agents of the Moroccan Consulate in the Canary Islands were on sick leave “with a diagnosis of anxiety due to labour conflict”. This newspaper has tried to obtain the Consulate’s version, but has not received a response.
Source: www.eldiario.es
