The case went as far as the Supreme Court of Spain . The employee made more than 150 calls to his own number to keep the line busy.
The Supreme Court of Justice of the Canary Islands, Spain , has declared as appropriate the dismissal of a teleworker who called during the day to avoid serving customers.
The case dates from October 2020 and it is only recently being clarified with the help of the corresponding entities: he also harmed his colleagues by his actions.
This is how the teleworker acted
The employee provided services to a company dedicated to computer support since 2019.
In October 2020, the employee received his disciplinary dismissal letter for not taking customer calls and was accused of using a fraudulent strategy.
This document describes that the worker made 150 calls to his own number to avoid requests from the company’s customers: he called himself to be redirected to another employee.
The calls totaled 22 hours and 40 minutes.
“This attitude has not been a one-off event, but has been repeated continuously month after month, and with different intervals of duration of these calls, which is why it has manifested fraud, disloyalty and breach of trust in the entrusted efforts”, refers to the document. “While your job is to serve customers and solve incidents, you have consciously and repeatedly falsified data by failing to serve customers, who hire us to provide them with a service and for which we charge.”
Justice speaks
In July 2023, the Social Court No. 4 of Santa Cruz de Tenerife dismissed a lawsuit filed by the worker. For the judge, his behavior was typical of “fraud, disloyalty and breach of trust.” In addition, he harmed his colleagues by overloading them with work.
Now the Supreme Court of the Canary Islands has dismissed the appeal raised again by the employee, stating that his dismissal “is proportional and appropriate to the seriousness of the acts committed.”