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Cases in the area of employment
22.
A Coruña.
Employment.
Direct discrimination.
On Thursday 17 July 2014, the participants in the Learning by
Doing project from A Coruña had their first visit to one of the companies (a hypermarket) collaborating with
the Project.
The participants car-pooled to get to the supermarket. They were scheduled to meet with the project’s head
teacher and the FSG enterprise mediator at 10:15 at the supermarket. They arrived 15 minutes early and were
waiting in their cars. When the teacher and enterprise mediator arrived, they greeted the students and before
going in they introduced themselves to the store manager and the area director (responsible for several stores).
The area manager asked if the people who were waiting outside were the same people who were here now for
the visit and he was surprised to find out that indeed they were. He did not know that the Fundación Secretar-
iado Gitano had organised the visit (he thought it was a group of school children and he was unfamiliar with the
Learning by Doing project). He said that he thought it was “strange” to see people outside sitting in their cars
and so someone had called the police.
Plain-clothes national police were arriving at that very moment. This is what they called an “internal security pro-
tocol”. Supermarket employees spoke with the police who then left. No searches were made and the police did
not check any of the cars. The FSG representatives explained the project, the aim of the visit and the history
of collaboration between the Foundation and this chain of hypermarkets. All previous contact had been with a
different person, the HR director of the north zone. Apparently, she had not sufficiently briefed her co-workers
prior to this visit. In any case, we believe that the shopping centre personnel had adopted a discriminatory atti-
tude. The young people waiting outside in their cars were not doing anything wrong or that could raise any sort
of suspicion. While it was never said explicitly, our conclusion was that the only suspicious thing was that 20
Roma were waiting at that hour of the morning in their cars in the supermarket parking lot.
The FSG addressed this case as they didn’t want the Learning by Doing participants to be affected. After that
incident, the FSG teacher introduced the participants to the supermarket personnel and the visit proceeded
seamlessly and the programme participants were very happy to have seen first-hand the work they would be
doing once the internships began.
23.
Galicia.
Employment.
Direct discrimination.
One of the students from the Learning by Doing project that the
FSG is implementing in A Coruña informed the head teacher of the current project that in the place where he
is doing his practical training as a supermarket cashier, he was told that he was not authorised to ring up Roma
customers. The student responded that for him this job was his top priority and that he would immediately in-
form his superiors if he saw anyone shoplifting, irrespective of whether they were Roma or non-Roma. The store
manager justified the order by saying that he was inexperienced and could easily be deceived. He said that he
would be very uncomfortable telling Roma customers that he could not ring them up and felt that this was an
unnecessary measure. That was the end of the conversation and he continued to ring up all of the customer who
came to his cash register.
The student reported this situation and the Service for victims of racial or ethnic discrimination paid the super-
market a visit. He informed the Service of what had happened but asked them not to intervene directly with the
company or with the shop manager (with whom he now felt comfortable and respected; his practical experience
was going very well and he had no further incident with the company) until he had concluded his training (De-
cember 2014). It was decided to take the following action once he had finished his training:
- Inform the human resources department of what had happened to make sure that it goes on record.
- Propose training sessions on interculturalism in the workplace and try to raise awareness among Eroski per-
sonnel.
We believe that awareness-raising and equal treatment work would be more effective if done by the FSG
office in A Coruña since we have direct contact with the people involved in the case and in order to not harm
the training process (or chances of future employment) arising from the Learning by Doing project, or future
collaboration with the company. Therefore, to avoid duplicating efforts, we requested that intervention be done
only by the FSG office in A Coruña.