The lifeless body of Inmaculada, the deceased operator on June 13 during his workday, he remained in the office for nearly two hours without anyone giving the order to stop working. Inmaculada was 56 years old and had been in the Konecta group for fifteen years, a large company —more than 12,000 employees— that offers customer service and telemarketing to third-party companies. He died of a heart attack. The Samur’s doctors tried to revive her after she collapsed, but were unsuccessful.
“It fell to the ground before one in the afternoon,” explains Miguel Ángel Salinas, CGT’s occupational risk prevention delegate at the company, who later went to the scene. “At a quarter past one his death was certified. But the office was not cleared until three in the afternoon. Those responsible for the campaign should have told the rest of the workers to leave, but they did not. There was no order to evict.
Two days after the event, the union publicly denounced that office managers told workers that they continue taking calls with the corpse next to them. “The service continued as if nothing had happened,” the statement said. However, he continues, “someone repeatedly repeated: we are an essential service.” The CGT text reproduces WhatsApp messages from confused workers, such as “she is lying on the floor and we are taking calls.”
He call center The one in which Inmaculada died is on the sixth floor of a huge office building in the San Blas neighborhood of Madrid. The deceased was answering calls for an electric company. “They’re not very nice calls,” Salinas continues. “They are claims from people whose supply has been cut off.” In this type of company, the telemarketer works connected to a telephone through which calls come in and You have no option to disconnect. For lack of a clear order and for fear of reprisals, many of the workers continued with their task. Others were simply shocked.
“I would leave it in that the order to stop working was not given,” adds Álvaro García, spokesman for the UGT, a union that has also made a statement highlighting its “discomfort and indignation for the unfortunate performance” of the company “It has been said that the workers were forced to continue, but some of them have come out afterwards to say that no one forced them.”
The CGT delegates arrived at the office around two, about 45 minutes after the death was certified. “What we denounced,” says Loreto Márquez, also a CGT delegate and present at the scene, “is that when we arrived and said that the room had to be evacuated, those responsible told us that it was an essential service and that they could not disconnect. That’s where the indignation started. We contacted the company’s risk prevention technician, she asked us to wait for her to arrive and there, for about an hour, people kept taking calls.”
At three, finally, the company’s occupational hazard manager gave the order to evacuate. The body remained in the office until after four, when the funeral services of Madrid came to remove it. The police, say those consulted, were present at all times.
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El Periódico de España, from Grupo Prensa Ibérica, has contacted Konecta, which did not respond to a request for information. According to the sources consulted, Konecta has recognized Inmaculada’s heart attack as work accident. The next day, he sent the workers an email, “in a politically correct tone,” according to UGT, regretting what had happened. This Monday, when the news has gone viral on social networks and has jumped to television, the employees of the call centers from the area —the one from Konecta is not the only one— they admitted not knowing much more than what they had read in the press.
“The question is if they forced them to continue taking calls. I don’t know, because I work in the competition, but because of how these companies work, I think so”, says a worker while smoking at the door of the building. As soon as COVID broke out, Konecta made headlines for failing to comply with security measures at its work centers in Madrid. For their part, the unions have met to demand the preparation of “a protocol” in case a similar case occurs again.