Domestika, an online training platform of Spanish origin, is facing a lawsuit for collective dismissal after throwing out dozens of workers. Those affected put the number of layoffs at 150 worldwide, of which at least 70 would have been in Spain. Asked by this means, the CEO of the company, Julio Cotorruelo, denies it and says that “not much less” they have laid off that number of people and that, in fact, they have 40 open positions.
Most people fired they worked remotely and did not know each other personally, which makes it difficult for them to count, although they assure that their figures come from the chat group of dismissed workers that they created for this purpose. “We were fired over the phone. While I was on the call I could see how my accounts were being closed: Adobe, Gmail, everything,” says one of them. “The laid-offs were asking those still inside to collect as many phones as they could.”
According to the CEO, Domestika has about 800 employees “on a global level”. The parent company, Domestika INC, has been in the United States since 2010 and has “approximately” fourteen subsidiaries, of which two are in Spain: DMSTK, established in 2014, and Estudios de Recordación digital, established in 2019.
The germ of the company is in a forum of non-profit Spanish designers, created in 2004, which grew and created a large community until it was absorbed in 2008 by Webactiva, the company to make web pages that Cotorruelo directed at the time. The businessman bought the domain, hired the people who were in charge of the project and promoted it independently. In 2013 he sold Webactiva and was left alone with Domestika, exploring, among other avenues, the educational business.
DMSTK and Digital Recording Studios added a total of 192 employees in 2020, according to the accounts deposited in the Mercantile Registry. They show the extraordinary growth experienced during the pandemic, when the demand for online courses skyrocketed. Together, they exceeded nine million euros of turnover in said exercise.
As a result of this pandemic success, the company announced last January an investment round of 110 million dollars (105 million euros) at a valuation of 1,200 million, which raised its status to “unicorn”, the term by which companies valued at more than one billion are known.
Domestika now gathers a community of 8 million creative minds and just reached unicorn status, with a 1.3 billion valuation. Read more about it here 👇https://t.co/IjRKyz1AVl
— Domestika (@Domestika) January 27, 2022
In Spain, they are part of the unicorns club Glovo, Jobandtalent, eDreams, Wallbox, Cabify, Idealista, Devo, Travelperk and Flywire.
“It’s an undercover ERE”
Of all the laid off 33 have joined in a single case to request its annulment. All have presented a conciliation and lawsuit ballot, according to the defense attorney for the case, Esther Coma from Colectivo Ronda Madrid.
Coma explains that it is possible that the lawsuit has not yet reached the company (when asking for its version for this article, Corretuelo assured that Domestika was not being sued by anyone).
eat waited for form a group of more than thirty people to enter within the thresholds defined by law.
Spanish legislation requires companies to process an ERE (Employment Regulation File) when they fire a certain percentage of employees within a period of three months —more than thirty workers if the company has more than 300 or more than 10% of the workforce if it has between one hundred and 300—, something that Domestika has not done. “By affecting more than thirty workers, it is an undercover ERE yes or yes”Coma maintains.
Processing a collective dismissal implies sitting down to negotiate the conditions with the workers. It is less agile than firing them one by one. Cotorruelo argues that neither of the two Spanish subsidiaries has laid off more than thirty people and that they are completely independent companies: one dedicated to the audiovisual production of courses and the other to software development and marketing.
Those laid off, some hired by DMSTK and others by Digital Recording Studios, They considered themselves part of the same group. “All the emails were @domestika.org and we all talked to each other,” they say. When the layoffs took place, the number of members of Slack, a corporate chat tool, dropped substantially.
“What these employees claim is that, de facto, both companies would form a business group and that adding the figures in both companies, the number would exceed thirty. This is a completely legitimate position, but Domestika’s position is just as legitimate in saying and demonstrating that this is not the case”, adds Cotorruelo.
Dismissal for “absence of work”
The layoffs occurred in March and were individual. “We were all fired for the same reason: absence from work for four days. I asked why they put that, if it was a lie, and they admitted that they couldn’t put anything else. That they had grown a lot during the pandemic, but they no longer had as much demand for courses and had to reduce“, adds the affected.
According to the story of those affected, who wrote a joint statement, the company invited them to sign that dismissal and go to the conciliation act, promising to recognize compensation of 33 days per year worked.
“Unfortunately, this is very common. Companies tell people not to worry, that they will give them 33 days and most people signso the matter does not transcend”, says Coma. “But the truth is that it is a null dismissal”.
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“Imagine that you have not missed work and the company puts you in a dismissal letter that you have missed four days,” continues the lawyer. “If they put the truth, that in a pandemic the demand for courses increased a lot and that they no longer have as much, it is even more evident. They have tried to hide it. All this is done conscientiously. They know that if they argue an economic or productive cause for the company is necessarily a dismissal for objective reasons and that if they exceed a certain threshold they have to make a collective dismissal. They have been quite crude in the executionbut it would have been cruder to say that it is an objective cause”.
Coma informs that the conciliation act will be on May 9. “If an agreement is not reached that day, which I don’t think so because it is a complex case, it will go to trial,” he concludes. “Us We believe that the dismissals are null and they have to be reinstated”.