Two sex scandals shake the Gijón public cleaning company: “Where does the sexiest thing go?”

At the beginning of the year, a worker from Emulsa, the Gijón municipal cleaning company, filed a complaint with the company for labor abuse by a superior.

He complained about workload issues and the foreman's bad manners.

The public company opened an investigation in which it questioned several employees.

In those meetings with his companions they found something else.

In one of them, the interviewee commented that this was not the worst, that he had seen colleagues cry because of the harassment of that foreman.

Little by little, more voices joined that story, all the testimonies accurately shaped the portrait of this boss who touched unnecessarily, entered the locker room, took photos and made off-tone comments to his most vulnerable subordinates.

The scandal has shaken Gijón this week because it is also added to another in the same period of time.

A circular sent from the town hall to all the schools and institutes of the city alerted the directors of the centers of the detention of an employee of the same company for alleged corruption of minors.

The judicial order establishes a minimum distance of 200 meters from any place where there are children.

Although both cases are not related, for many they do show the need to change things in a 100% public company in which some voices consulted denounce that there is a "pact of silence" in this company that employs more than 700 people .

Vehicle parking of the municipal company Emulsa. DAVID EXPÓSITO

Olmo Ron is the Councilor for Maintenance and Public Works and President of Emulsa.

“Everyone knew about it and no one reported it...”, he laments.

He talks about the case of the 60-year-old foreman fired over allegations of continued abuse.

The investigation into his treatment of female employees describes 20 years of unwanted compliments, habitual touching and obscene words, of psychologically affected female workers and of colleagues who were silent or laughed at him.

"Where does the sexiest thing go?" reflects the report prepared by a commission that told an employee.

Those in charge of the investigation were two Emulsa employees, two occupational risk prevention technicians and two City Council delegates.

“They unanimously determine that there is harassment and give full credibility to the deponents who are either direct witnesses of what happened or the affected ones themselves,”

says the councilman.

From the investigations it is deduced that the boss's attitude was

in the template.

"It hurts especially because this company was the first to pass its equality plan, but if it's only done on paper and not in reality, it's no use," admits Ron.

Olmo Ron, councilor of the Gijón city council. DAVID EXPÓSITO

For Ron, what this case actually reflects is a way of managing a company rooted in the past, one of cleaning up dirty laundry at home: “There are relationships between managers who protect each other by trying to safeguard the image of the company or who seek to fix it in their own way without using the established protocols”.

The report reflects that one of the foreman's superiors and the service manager met to talk about the issue with them in a cafeteria far from the headquarters where they all worked.

The City Council has proposed the dismissal of the company's manager, Alfredo Baragaño, but the Board of Directors made up of municipal representatives, citizen associations and unions voted against this Friday.

On October 14, the foreman accused of abuse signed his dismissal letter.

The investigation also makes it clear that some of the women tried to ask for help and were ignored.

For now, none of the victims has taken the step of denouncing.

The matter has now been left in the hands of the Prosecutor's Office.

“What we are seeing is one of the problems that women have when they suffer violence: the difficulty of denouncing.

Even when the immediate environment finds out, they are not helped or supported to move forward," said the mayor, Ana González, before entering a meeting on Monday with the representatives of the city's feminist associations to discuss this issue. affair.

“This man evaluated temporary workers, which is terrible.

He was someone with real power, with a very important power.

Imagine being a worker and being touched by a guy like that, ”she added.

Meeting between the mayor Ana González and representatives of the Gijón Women's Council. DAVID EXPÓSITO

Charo Blanco and María José Cuervo are leaders in the Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Gijón.

This group has a seat on the Emulsa Board of Directors.

"Where were the colleagues, the unions, where were the middle managers, the political positions?" Cuervo asks.

Manuel Cañete, the president of this federation, is outraged: “But how can it be that 80% of the mark of a temporary worker facing an indefinite contract is marked by his foreman?

Are we in the middle ages?

His representative on the Emulsa board voted no to the dismissal of the manager and they justify their decision: “It is that we do not want this to stay with that dismissal, we want everyone to be investigated, those who knew and did not act, those who looked on the other hand, those who tried to cover it up”.

In addition to the earthquake caused by this case in the city, the alleged pedophile street sweeper was added in the same week, about which the city's educational centers were warned.

In the circular that was sent to the directors, the Department of Education added the judge's order in which part of the police investigation was reported, with the personal data of the accused and his mother, with whom he lives.

He is an employee of Emulsa for two decades, as can be seen on his social networks.

The detainee was already investigated in the past for sexual crimes against minors, for which he already had a restraining order against a teenager.

Children playing in the courtyard of a school in Gijón. DAVID EXPÓSITO

This man missed work for two days, and it was impossible to find him.

When he returned on Monday he explained what had happened: the police had arrested him and seized his electronic devices.

Union sources indicate that then, after many years covering the same neighborhood with her broom and his car, his superiors transferred him to a farther one.

These same sources point out that the police investigation influenced the change of destination.

Now that the case has come to light after the municipal statement, the worker has been suspended from his post at least until the trial.

The car to which this newspaper has had access specifies that the police located in a cloud of Google Photos in the name of the detainee in which numerous pedophile material stored between March and July 2022 appeared and that the approach to some of his victims occurred in school children's recess hours.

For this reason, the Public Prosecutor's Office requires that it be away from educational centers.

"His presence near minors constitutes a risk for all of them," the letter stresses.

Two scandals in the same week that could be the tip of the iceberg of something that has been brewing for years.

A generalized silence that has now exploded twice.

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