Denounce the 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 pertinent, for corrective and sanctioning measures to be adopted. Plataforma will also take the case to the Ombudsman of Barcelona and will report Aticco to the new Office for the Protection of Linguistic Rights of the Generalitat de Catalunya because the signs and fixed information in the premises must appear, at least, in Catalan. The company has assured ARA that it regrets "the biased interpretation" of the facts and the fact that "a strictly labor decision has been presented as a linguistic conflict, which is non-existent". The Minister of Linguistic Policy has ordered the Office for the Protection of Linguistic Rights "to study the case and adopt the appropriate measures".

The platform has made public the first two points of the dismissal letter. The first states that the worker initiated "direct conversations in Catalan" and that it was "necessary to expressly request a change to Spanish to ensure correct communication." According to the company, this would have generated "tension in the professional environment," and gives the example that on one occasion when asked to change the language, she said: "If you had asked me politely, 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 primary language in certain communications." One example is the automatic out-of-office vacation reply message, which she did in Catalan and English.

Two contrasting versions

Plataforma per la Llengua considers it "extraordinarily serious" that Aticco goes as far as "including in the dismissal letter that the use of the city's own language is one of the causes for dismissal". The entity believes that the company, the largest "coworking" space in Barcelona, discriminated against the worker based on language and imposed Spanish as the usual language of communication in a Barcelona workplace, even though there are users of the space who understand Catalan.

This Thursday the company issued a statement explaining that "at Aticco there is no official company language" and that "communication adapts to the reality of the teams and interlocutors" for a "matter of respect, inclusion, and customer orientation". The director of operations, Naiala Chaler, assures ARA that Catalan is a common language within the company and that the dismissal has a total of ten points, two of which refer to language, admitting that "they have wording that is not correct". Aticco does not give written linguistic guidelines to employees, but in the case of public-facing professionals, the order is to "adapt as much as possible to the language that clients speak, at least English and Spanish". According to Chaler, they had received complaints from colleagues and clients about the girl's insistence on Catalan.

The worker, dismissed in February, was responsible for the Barri Gòtic center since May 2025. The woman had been receiving reprimands to abandon the use of Catalan because "the official language of Aticco is Spanish". When she was reproached for using Catalan, they told her that clients did not understand her, even though she says the opposite: "No client ever reproached me for speaking Catalan. It was at the internal team level, at the daily level: I can no longer express myself in Catalan", she states in declarations made public by the entity. Plataforma also highlights that Aticco is a Catalan company with several very central offices in Barcelona. In May, they presented a co-working space in Glòries, ""the largest in Southern Europe", precisely in Poblenou, a neighborhood where Plataforma recalls that residents have reported worrying gentrification.