Absolute disability. At age 40, X. is not fit to work in any job and must receive a pension indefinitely. This is determined by the National Social Security Institute (INSS) in a resolution about a worker – who asks to remain anonymous – after his performance for exactly two years and four months in the CCC company, which moderates from the Torre Glòries in Barcelona. content for the North American company Meta, on Facebook and Instagram.
This man, from a Central European country, joined the company at the beginning of 2019 as a video and image leaker. As time went by, the hardness of the material he had to remove grew. x. sick leave. When the temporary leave period had expired, the employee's legal defense, carried out by Joan Josep Gimeno, of Coronas Advocats, requested absolute disability resulting from X.'s work accident, which was granted by the INSS after a favorable opinion from a medical court. .
As is common in these cases, the INSS has set a date from which X's health status can be reviewed. Starting next July, he will be summoned again before the medical court to issue a new opinion.
An investigation by La Vanguardia revealed in October that around 400 workers at the CCC headquarters in Barcelona were on sick leave, mainly affected by the content they had to filter and also by the working conditions. Many of them, collectively or individually, have various legal proceedings open against CCC. One of them, through criminal proceedings, for alleged crimes against workers' rights, injuries due to serious negligence and against moral integrity.
A report from the Labor Inspection highlights that until September 2020, the company lacked a psychosocial risk evaluation system, meaning that X had spent about twenty months since his hiring without an analysis of the effects on his health of everything he saw . CCC had a wellness area for staff to rest and psychological assistance 24 hours a day, but numerous workers interviewed by La Vanguardia in the fall explained that they were generally light talks with the psychologist before returning again to the horror of the networks. .
X. has other files open against CCC: civil liability, for challenging the benefit surcharge and a judicial procedure for determining a contingency; that is, if your illness derives from a common illness or a work accident. The Labor Inspection determined that it was the latter, but the company challenged it before the social courts, which have set the trial for February 2025.
As La Vanguardia published last January, Social Court 28 of Barcelona already confirmed the criteria of the Labor Inspection in the case of another CCC moderator, considering the contingency derived from a work accident.
After having worked since 2000 in the areas of finance, communications and energy of the government of his country, X. decided to move to Barcelona in 2013 to work in a banking entity. Months later, it moved the offices to Brussels but X. had already created his life in Barcelona, so he was left without a job. Through a friend, in 2018 she learned of an offer to moderate Facebook and Instagram content. At the end of that year she went to a job interview that lasted “about seven minutes,” he explains to this newspaper.
After a two-week training, in which they barely faced harsh images, they began to work on the night shift, demonstrating very high efficiency. X. speaks several languages. In addition to the very hard content, he was affected by the pace imposed by the managers. CCC moderators must flag around 400 tickets daily, that is, deciding whether a video is publishable or not.
One night, X. made more than a thousand. “I ended up exhausted, I didn't even know what I was marking.” Without going into details: X. was especially affected by extremely harsh pedophile videos.
Now she has just had her first child and her cries take her back to the CCC days. “There are things that I can't erase from my head. "If I hear the baby's screams I connect with all that again, it's very hard."
The man, in any case, tries to look forward. He would like to train in creating online businesses, although for now, with significant concentration and attention problems, he does not feel qualified. If the evolution were positive, the medical court could reduce the disability to total, which would allow him to be employed in a sector other than content moderation.
Recently X. and CCC have reached a separation agreement.
