News in 3Cat. A woman applies for a job at the Som Energia cooperative. She's pregnant and doesn't have high hopes, but she applies anyway. Her starting point is realistic. Who would hire a pregnant woman? The unusual thing is that, after the interview, she's told she's been chosen from among the 13 candidates. The job is hers, despite being pregnant. Everyone's happy. Overjoyed. Until the administration gets involved.
After the good news, the farcical ordeal set in motion by the Labor Inspectorate begins. The company receives a notification Precisely because they had hired a pregnant woman. According to Som Energia's management, "the Labor Inspectorate's approach was that we had to justify why we had hired a pregnant person." Because the Labor Inspectorate suspected it was fraud. Because the inspector considered it "very strange."
The law addresses discrimination and penalizes it. It's the easiest thing to see and detect. But no one can imagine that someone could do things right and comply with the law. That's why the suspicion and the demand for documentation fall on the wrong person. Because everyone is guilty until proven innocent. And it was the company that had to clarify, with a lot of documentation and a lot of wasted time, that it wasn't fraud at all. On the contrary. It was putting into practice what the law says, however strange it might seem to an inspector.
This story highlights how unusual it is for a woman to have the same opportunities. Because it's not just that women suffer discrimination because they're the ones who get pregnant. When the baby is born, there's still a very significant difference between those who take maternity leave and those who decide to reduce their working hours. That's why closing the infamous gender pay gap still seems a long way off. Extremely far off. But, regardless of this, which is by no means a minor issue, this story leads us to reflect on the incredulity generated by unusual events. Unusual decisions are so uncommon that our first reaction is suspicion. It seems we lack the automatic mechanism to celebrate a decision that may be unusual but is also correct. What emerges, however, is doubt and suspicion. What lies behind a decision that deviates from the majority? What benefit is gained? This common thought—we all fall into it—is extremely depressing and has to do with how we've assumed that, from the outset, nobody intends to do things right. Or that doing them right is foolish. We think all companies want to screw over workers and that most people's goal is to get rich, not improve the world. That's why, because we'd think the same, we justify the labor inspector. And because, often, we don't obey the law out of a sense of justice—because some laws are still unjust—but because not obeying it complicates our lives.
This is a clear example of how we have to justify what we do correctly. Of how the innocent suffer for the guilty. It doesn't matter if you hire a pregnant woman because she's the best of all the candidates or if you're traveling and they search you thoroughly to see if you have nail clippers in your bag. In our daily lives, it's easier for us to appear guilty than innocent. And the question is whether it's possible to change that perspective.
