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It is a decisive decision for the different processes that oppose Cristina Tavares and the Fernando Couto corkscrew, in Santa Maria da Feira. The Constitutional Court (TC) confirmed the practice of moral harassment by the company and the payment of compensation of 31,110 euros to the employee, who has already been fired and reinstated on two occasions. And the decision, whose stamp dates from last July but which only now “went down” to the lower courts, takes on special relevance because “bullying is already taken for granted, it will never be possible to appeal again, and this will have a decisive influence in the various other processes that continue in the courts ”, according to the PUBLIC, said the lawyer of the unions representing the worker, Filipe Soares Pereira.
Currently, three different cases are ongoing in different courts against the corticeira. In one of them, filed last January, in the Social Court of Santa Maria da Feira, Cristina Tavares claims compensation of 80 thousand euros, for the non-material damage suffered. Regardless of the amount that is set, this action, says Filipe Soares Pereira, “is already won, because it was established that there was moral harassment.”
In another case, the employee claims 11,000 euros for the second dismissal to which she was targeted and which was also considered abusive by the courts. And, on another front, a complaint signed jointly by the CGTP and the Working Conditions Authority (ACT) for the practice is being investigated at the Department of Criminal Investigation and Action (DIAP) of Santa Maria da Feira. of moral harassment on the part of the cork. “This complaint either goes to trial or is filed, and I think the case was more or less awaiting the constitutional decision on moral harassment,” says the lawyer, for whom this criminal action, if it advances, “will have consequences. , in the sense that the crime of moral harassment can be autonomous ”.
The different legal battles, in which the cork company has already been forced to pay several fines for an accumulated value close to 40 thousand euros, have been going on for several years. When, after nine years of working on that cork board, they asked her to sign an amicable termination agreement that was based on the termination of her job, Cristina Tavares, then 47 and a dependent daughter, refused and appealed to the cut. Between the first instance decisions and the appeals that followed, the Porto Court of Appeal ended up forcing the cork company to reinstate it, also forcing the company to pay it for the months it was unemployed and three thousand euros in compensation.
This reintegration took place in May 2018 and the process did not stop there because then Cristina Tavares was prevented from returning to her job, as she was forced to stack and unpack the same cork bags with five thousand corks on a pallet. “I get to the end of making the pallet and I take it apart again. And then I’ll do the same again. At the end of the day, there are hundreds of bags. I no longer feel my wrists because I have to knead them with my hands, ”the employee later described in the first press conference in which she participated and in which she attributed the attempted dismissal to the fact that, because her son who suffered from Asperger was undergoing surgery, if she was forced to take two medical casualties in a short period of time. Fernando Couto has always been denying the veracity of such accusations, but court decisions have always been favorable to the employee. The PUBLIC could not contact Cristina Tavares.
