Albert Rivera asks for compensation for dismissal of 500 days per year worked when he claimed it was 20

as it progressed The Confidential newspaper, Rivera and Villegas, their number two during their time in Ciudadanos, decided to leave this week the company they joined in March 2020, shortly after leaving politics. According to the ex-politicians, the firm has breached the contract they signed, on the one hand for not fulfilling the commitment to name them executive president and vice president respectively and, on the other, for not paying them a series of variables also committed. These reasons lead both to claim their salaries from Martínez-Echeverría until March 2025, when the initialed contract ended.

In this way, both Rivera and Villegas are asking the company to compensate them with more than 1,000 days remaining until that date. As the lawyers have worked there since March 2020, the bill comes to more than 500 days per year worked, a considerably high amount compared to what Ciudadanos proposed to its voters when Rivera was in charge: a single contract with compensation of 20 days per year worked if it was a fair dismissal and 33 if it was not. All this, with a maximum of 12 monthly payments in the first case and 24 in the second.

The party, today in low hours, has been one of the main defenders of the single contract in Spain, a proposal that they have carried in many of their electoral programs but that they specifically reflected in a bill in 2018, a year before achieving its best electoral result, with 57 seats in Congress. In the text, they broke down the details of his proposal: the elimination of temporary contracts, except for some very specific cases (substitution and training contracts), for the creation of the aforementioned single contract.

The orange formation defended this modality as a way of combating the existing precariousness in the Spanish labor market and as a solution to temporality. Although the party did not touch the days for dismissal reflected in the 2012 labor reform -which have been maintained with the modification of the legislation validated last week in Congress-, it included some clauses that changed the conditions of dismissal. Some modifications that, according to the unions, they opened the door so that dismissals until now considered inappropriate could be legally justified much more easily.

Ciudadanos tried to negotiate a substitute for this contract both with the PSOE, in the failed investiture agreement with Pedro Sánchez, and on several occasions with the PP. However, his bill proposal in February 2018 was the most audacious attempt by the orange formation to materialize it. The proposal failed miserably in Congress: 33 votes in favor -they managed to convince the two deputies of the Unión del Pueblo Navarro- and 302 against.

All this happened when Ciudadanos was still booming, shortly before the best result of the formation, in the general elections of 2019. After the repetition of the elections that same year, the debacle of results that has accompanied the party since then began: between the two elections, those of Rivera left 47 seats, up to the 10 that they currently hold. Rivera took responsibility for the results and announced that he was leaving politics. His number two, who had accompanied him in politics since his beginnings in the Parliament of Catalonia, reported ten days later that he was also leaving Ciudadanos. Now, both claim compensation for dismissal from their company that perhaps would have garnered much more support in Congress.