The Social Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has declared inadmissible the dismissal of an employee assigned to the Güímar Post Office (Tenerife) after the State Postal and Telegraph Society suspected that the accused was the author of the disappearance of at least 23 shipments within a month.
The TSJC, like the Social Court, sets the compensation at just over 78,000 euros and even opens the door for the accused to be reinstated, considering the evidence provided by the state entity to be weak, although the ruling can be appealed before the Supreme Court.
The worker had been assigned to the municipality’s distribution unit since 1989 and was fired in 2021 because Correos considered that he had committed a “very serious” offense in his classification, distribution and unloading tasks by having free access to the cages in which he They find the packages.
At one point, the company began to detect the continuous loss of shipments, so it opened an administrative file after a certified letter containing two personal mobile phone cards disappeared.
After reviewing the security camera recording, it was detected that around six-thirty in the morning and for several days in a row, similar events were repeated, sometimes depositing the shipment in a blind spot of the camera and picking it up later.
In other cases, according to the complaint, the worker carefully manipulated and inspected the contents of different materials, always at the same time, and then placed them in his pocket and so on up to a dozen times on those same dates.
The facts were declared by the complainants as proven and attributable to the employee, and constituting a continued disciplinary offense of a very serious nature.
Specifically, it was considered that the worker had committed a violation of the confidentiality of correspondence while he alleged that he was the recipient of the shipments, an argument that the complainant did not consider “coherent” given that it is not the stipulated procedure.
At the same time, it seems “improbable” that among the thousands of packages someone tried to find those addressed to him by removing the trays, to which is added that his address is not in the delivery area of this unit.
The person in charge of distribution alleged that after the suspension of employment and salary, the continuous claims for the disappearance of shipments, which had become frequent to the point that in a single day, up to five were received, completely ceased.
The witness quantified the disappearances that were recorded between June and August 2020 at 23 and that completely ceased shortly before the dismissal took place.
From here on, the State Company decided to file a complaint with the Civil Guard and opened a disciplinary file and proceeded to dismissal.
Despite all this, the TSJC concludes that the evidence was rather hypothetical, it was only based for the most part on recordings that did not serve to prove the commission of a very serious offense or to declare the termination of the employment relationship appropriate.
In these instances, Correos is accused of limiting itself to arguing that there have been customer complaints and a suspicious attitude by the plaintiff, which would not be sufficient grounds for his dismissal to be declared fair.
