translated from Spanish: Court awarded the cessation of hundreds of officials

On Friday, July 5, Maribel received an email to let him know that he was due to go to the Federal Court of Conciliation and Arbitration the following Monday in order to obtain “financial compensation”, after his superiors made him sign a trade to resigning his place in the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), where he worked for more than 20 years for a monthly salary of 14 thousand pesos.
She was one of approximately 300 people who attended the Tribunal between Monday 8 and Wednesday 10 July, to conclude the process of separating the public administration from units such as the PDO, the Secretariat of Communications and Transport (SCT) and agencies such as the National People’s Fund (Fonhapo), and the Mining Development Trust.
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Animal Político went to the Court at that time and found the process of concluding the job of hundreds of former officials where even the conciliatory lawyers responsible for signing the minutes and handing out documentation were overtaken, as it is unusual to attend up to 100 cases a day as happened last week.
This process was the mechanism applied by the Federal government to terminate the employment relationship with hundreds of employees, and above all, to ensure that no one sued, as they should leave it sitting in a minutes before the Court.
In the face of thousands of redundancies in the civil service, there may also be hundreds of lawsuits, but that would involve spending human and economic resources for the units and the Court itself; therefore, this mechanism was a kind of “conciliation”, warns one of the lawyers of this agency, who requested that his name not be published.
Maribel, a fictitious name to protect her identity, took about six hours to finish her work history for the past two decades, with the PMI. He arrived at one of three times mentioned, handed in copies of his ID and waited his turn in the Court’s auditorium, along with approximately 100 other people, and in another room, another 30 people.
As they waited, the mood was angered by the lack of information in the Court, bewilderment and even sadness counting experiences in their passage through their respective dependence. From 9 a.m. the conciliatory lawyer began the work. I’d call them one by one, and I’d give them three papers.
The first was the “agreement” between the PSE, represented by the legal proxy Ana Karen Escalona Báez, and the public official, in which he sits that the latter “terminates the employment relationship that united him with the unit”, and in turn, the PSE agrees to the surrender of the financial compensation raised in the trade issued by Treasury number 307-A.0264 last February.
Read: Government compensates with less money than the law says to servers it asked to resign
The second was the record confirming the delivery of the compensation and accepting the amount. Therefore, “whenever I am fully satisfied with the payments made to me, I do not reserve any action or right to exercise against the PMI,” the documents shown to this medium by four former officials say.
The last was the check with the compensation calculated by three months’ salary on the base salary and the guaranteed compensation, as stipulated in the Treasury. That amount was already settled on the documents and the check. I mean, there was no negotiation with the former officials.
“In court were already the documents made, all ready. There was no chance to even talk about it. There were so many of us who were insanity, they just gave us to sign the documents, put the prints on, and there was no more way to reconcile,” Says Maribel.
He didn’t even try to claim for what little he was given, although he didn’t intend to sue either because “it’s a long time he takes and a lot of money.” She was an employee of the Professional Career Service, the mechanism by which she obtained and maintained her place by passing exams.
However, this figure only applied in the last 8 years. She was working at the unit for two decades as a trusted employee. In “compensation,” he has only been recognized since 2010. So, after these years of work he received just over 155 thousand pesos, but “it was that or nothing.”
The way they took the place away is the same as that counted by employees from other outbuildings. In his case it was on 31 May, known among PMI officials as “Black Friday”, for the number of layoffs. It was a normal day’s work, but the superiors informed their underlings that their places “expired” that day.
Although she, like other colleagues, asked for time to discuss the “resignation” document, they were not allowed. “Or you sign at this time, or there will be no Finiquito of the Treasury. If you’re going to sign it, you’re going to sign it right now or the offer’s over,” he was told. That’s why “I decided to sign it at the time or else I’ll be left with nothing,” he says in an interview.
Other officials interviewed had also been in the public administration for decades, especially since their work was operational, but in all cases they only took into account the last 8 or 10 years.
While changes occur in each administration, they are mostly in areas of general management, and while in some cases they lead people they trust for subaddresses, department heads down in the worst cases were only changed area; they remained because it was the ones who took the job forward and knew how the unit worked, says another of the employees consulted.
The mechanism was also repeated on Tuesday and last Wednesday with more PMI staff and dozens of other employees of the Fonapho and the Mining Fund, also operational, with salaries not exceeding 15 thousand pesos. They also accepted the liquidation, although they still don’t know what they will do after these years of work at the same site.
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Original source in Spanish