In November 2011, two years after Alberto Núñez Feijóo became president of the Xunta, the Galician Parliament approved, with the support of the PP and PSOE, a law to guarantee the independence of the public media.
With it, the appointment by reinforced majority of the Chamber of the general director of the Galician Radio Television Company (CRTVG) and its Board of Directors was forced.
After more than a decade, Feijóo, the politician who has carved out the image of a great manager who has boosted him to the presidency of his party, leaves Galicia without having fulfilled his own law and leaves public radio and television with two open fronts : a strike against temporary contracts and an already historic protest, that of the
black Venres
(Black Friday), against information manipulation that exceeds 200 weeks: the longest of a public media outlet in Spain.
Driven, as the opposition insists on denouncing, by the wind in favor that the public media have blown him, Feijóo has consumed the successive mandates in Galicia without listening to the professionals of the CRTVG -which has a staff of 930 people and 121 million budget - who have not stopped insisting on their protests against the job insecurity of temporary workers and against political manipulation.
Strikes happen periodically.
Four years after the last one, highly supported, the workers have made a new call.
At the moment, with mobilizations that will become part-time strikes on the 20th and 27th, and full-time on May 2 with an intensive weekend shift.
They protest "against the destruction of jobs" and to "demand the consolidation of all long-term temporary employment", now forced by the new interim law that came into force at the end of 2021 to reduce temporary employment public".
“Nothing has changed in the 13 years of the Feijóo governments,” says Raimundo Méndez, a member of the consortium's inter-center committee.
He relates that although he came to the Galician government promising the transformation of public broadcasting, Feijóo "has done nothing but put it exclusively at the service of his party."
The president of the committee, Tiago Alvite.
highlights that the management seeks to "eliminate vacancies or positions occupied for years by temporary personnel that could be consolidated in the extraordinary processes that must be carried out under the new law that seeks to reduce temporary hiring by 8%".
They assure that there are 300 temporary professionals in a situation of fraud, in some cases legally recognized;
workers who have been chaining fraudulent contracts for even 15 years.
The unions estimate that 40% of the CRTVG staff.
Sources from the consortium, headed since 2009 by Alfonso Sánchez-Izquierdo, maintain that they have offered 100% coverage of the staff and the call for 269 places "which the social part has not signed, so the mobilizations are maintained."
Regarding the legitimacy of the general director, they rely on Valedora do Pobo's rejection of the unions' complaint for non-compliance with the 2011 media law. In its response, Valedora gives legitimacy to the position by alluding to a reform introduced in 2015 by the Xunta, without prior notice, in the law accompanying the budgets that came to knock down the legal requirement of parliamentary consensus.
In the same sense, the popular spokesperson expresses herself in the control commission of the corporation, Raquel Arias, who highlights "the process of employment consolidation, with 193 places in 2012 and now the offer of 269 places to achieve complete stability".
And he adds that the corporation “has healthy accounts and obtained a surplus in 2021 of 2.8 million”, in addition to significant social support with “maximum levels of programming identification among the population of more than 90%, year after anus".
He also affirms that when Feijóo was sworn in as president, the then Radiotelevision company "had its accounts revoked, a complex labor situation with complaints before the courts and the image damaged by the scandals among the government partners themselves [the bipartisan PSOE-BNG] and even 12 convictions of the electoral board for lack of neutrality”.
Nothing to do with the story of the opposition.
"The situation is devastating both at a reputational, labor and legal level," says María González Albert, spokesperson for the BNG in the control commission.
He assures that the public media in Galicia “are an extension of the PP press office” and warns that the manipulation “has been so clamorous for years that it will be very difficult to avoid the tight control that the Galician Government exercises over the editorial line ”.
The difficulty of "reversing the situation" with Feijóo already out of the Xunta also worries the socialist parliamentarian Noa Díaz.
"The problem is not the person but the concept of the playpen," she points out, pointing out that they have "perverted the CRTVG to the maximum."
Díaz adds to the denunciation of information manipulation, that of the renunciation of one's own and cultural content and the "enormous setback in terms of equality, with numerous complaints."
In favor of the equality policy of the consortium, Arias alludes to the "certificate of equal company in gender" granted by the Vigo Free Zone Consortium.
While from the direction of the public entity they estimate between 50 or 60 the number of workers who support the
black Venres
, who link to the BNG, the opposition assures that there are 250 those who protest, with which the socialist spokeswoman wonders: "what Would your company put up with more than 20% of your workforce insisting that you comply with the law?
And she adds that the CEO "repeats that he does not want to continue but it has been 13 years and we continue like this."
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