Denounce 'coworking' Aticco for having fired a worker for speaking Catalan

BarcelonaPlataforma per la Llengua has filed a complaint with the Labour Inspectorate against the office and co-working space company Aticco "for having dismissed a worker for habitually speaking Catalan at work, in Barcelona", they explain in a statement. The entity hopes that an investigation will be opened into the Catalan company "to investigate whether it has imposed Spanish as the mandatory language of communication and has limited the use of Catalan" and, if appropriate, for corrective and sanctioning measures to be adopted. Plataforma will also take the case to the Síndic de Greuges of Barcelona and will report Aticco to the new Office for the Protection of Linguistic Rights of the Generalitat de Catalunya, as the signs and fixed information in the premises must be displayed, at least, in Catalan.

Plataforma has made public the first two points of the dismissal letter. The first states that the worker "directly initiated conversations in Catalan" and that it was "necessary to expressly request her to switch to Spanish to ensure correct communication". According to the company, this would have generated "tension in the professional environment", and gives as an example that on one occasion when asked to change language, she said: "If you had asked me nicely, I would have done it".

The second point goes in the same direction, stating that the worker had been given "repeated instructions by the manager for Spanish to be the usual language of use in the professional environment", and that she had "maintained the use of Catalan as the main language in certain communications". An example is the automatic out-of-office holiday message, which she sent in Catalan and English.

Plataforma per la Llengua considers it "of extraordinary gravity" that Aticco goes so far as to "include in the dismissal letter that the use of the city's own language is one of the reasons for dismissal". The entity considers that the company, the largest coworking space in Barcelona, discriminated against the worker on grounds of language and imposed Spanish as the usual language of communication in a workplace in Barcelona, despite the fact that there are users of the space who understand Catalan. According to the entity, the worker decided not to take legal action and "chose a transformative path to correct the structural deficiencies of the company" because it is requested that the situation in these centres be reversed.

The worker, who was fired in February, had been in charge of the Gothic Quarter center since May 2025. The woman had been receiving reprimands for abandoning the use of Catalan because "the official language of Aticco is Spanish". When she was reprimanded for using Catalan, they told her that clients did not understand her, even though she says the opposite: "No client ever reprimanded me for speaking Catalan. It was at an internal team level, on a daily basis: I can no longer express myself in Catalan," she says, according to statements made public by the entity.

Plataforma, moreover, highlights that Aticco is a Catalan company with several very central offices in Barcelona. In May, they presented a coworking space in Glòries, ""the largest in southern Europe", precisely in a neighborhood where Plataforma recalls that residents have reported worrying gentrification.