Televisión de Galicia worker harassment case comes to court

Earlier this year, we drew attention to the case of Fito Ferreiro Seoane, a cameraman from A Coruña in Spain who has worked at public broadcaster Televisión de Galicia (TVG) since 1985.

As well as being a professional video journalist and camera operator, Ferreiro has been an activist defending the rights of the LGBTI community since 1998, at first independently and from 2006, with the social democratic party PSOE. He became Federal coordinator of the LGBTI group of that party and also a local councillor in A Coruña from 2015 to 2019. 

Fito explained to us how, once he gained a public profile for his activism "I noticed that my professional career began to disappear." Fito had been sent to international hotspots and warzones, covering complex stories in places like East Timor, Bosnia, Iraq and Venezuela over the course of his long career. Now, he says, he no longer even gets assigned to cover national and regional elections.

In 2020, Fito started suffering from panic attacks. It was a psychologist who helped Fito draw the connection to the deterioration in his working conditions.

On Friday 24 September, Fito's labour harassment case against TVG is being heard by Judge María Iria Román Vidarte at the 3rd Social Court of Santiago de Compostela. Fito alleges that, since 2005, he has been discriminated against at TVG and is calling for equalities training to be instituted at the company. Four witnesses are due to give testimony at this morning’s hearing. Fito is supported by a number of NGOs in Spain, including Fundación Española por los Derechos Humano, Fundación Triangulo and Fundación 26 de Diciembre.

As a permanent employee, Fito cannot be dismissed, but he thinks that colleagues at TVG who are working on less secure contract terms, are also experiencing discrimination at the company. National polling we published earlier this year shows that a majority of lower paid workers in Spain have little faith in their employers' commitments to protecting whistleblowers.

Spain is one of a handful of EU countries which has yet to make meaningful progress in giving force to new Union-wide whistleblower protections in national law.