In the corridors of high finance, an institutional communication channel is usually a Bloomberg screen or an email with a cryptographic signature. On the docks of Puerto del Rosario, where Port Authority president Gustavo Santana lives, the logistical frontier of Atlantic trade, the daily operation of reconnecting containers is coordinated through a 12-person WhatsApp group whose members do not even use their names, but their census numbers. The judges have determined the legal validity of the WhatsApp group as a binding channel for summoning stevedores: failing to show up for the company five times in one month constitutes a very serious offense of repeated absence, making clear that in modern logistics, muting the company chat can be very costly.
This is the anatomy of the dispute between veteran stevedore D.M.C.N. and the employer Centro Portuario de Empleo de Fuerteventura, S.A. (CPE Fuerteventura), which has now been settled by the judicial authorities. It was a labor dispute with elements of a corporate comedy of errors, valued at exactly €184.54 gross per day. That is what a stevedore with that seniority earns; in Tarfaya, that is per month.
The conflict began to take shape in the summer, when D.M.C.N., a stevedore whose seniority has been recognized since June 1, 2003, filed a complaint with the Labor Inspectorate warning of maintenance deficiencies in a crane operated on the dock by the shipping agent Naviera Armas, S.A., now a financial product of Baleària.
The whim of €11,000: the stevedore who thought he was above the company’s WhatsApp
A deputy inspector visited the port facilities to audit the machinery, but kept the complainant’s identity strictly secret. Operational tensions immediately shifted to the digital sphere in October, when the CPE Fuerteventura coordinator issued five consecutive calls in the corporate chat to cover “doubling (literally)” shifts after the morning workdays. The worker’s census number appeared on the screen five times for container-reconnection and road-traffic operations.
The employee’s response turned the chat into a silent battlefield. D.M.C.N. completed his regular morning shifts but systematically decided to ignore the five reconnection messages, accumulating five no-shows in a single calendar month without providing medical or operational justification. In November, CPE Fuerteventura’s management responded by opening disciplinary proceedings that culminated in a sanction for a very serious offense under the sector’s Fifth Framework Agreement: 60 days’ suspension from employment and pay, resulting in a direct wage loss of more than €11,000 for the worker.
In the judicial battlefield, the defense strategy attempted to deploy the guarantee of indemnity, arguing that the sanction was nothing more than retaliation orchestrated because he had reported the danger posed by Naviera Armas, S.A.’s cranes, while seeking to reclassify the absences as merely minor offenses. However, the Social Chamber in Las Palmas applied purely Anglo-Saxon rigor in dismissing the appeal.
The judges determined that the Inspectorate had never revealed who filed the complaint, meaning the employer could not retaliate against someone whose identity it officially did not know. The ruling also confirmed the legal validity of the WhatsApp group as a binding channel for summonses and concluded that failing to show up for the company five times in one month constitutes a very serious offense of repeated absence, making clear that in modern logistics, muting the company chat can be very costly.
The post Stevedoring in the Port Authority president’s city is run through a 12-person WhatsApp group was first published on canarymaritime.com.
