FCC Environmental's Barcelona city office and ONCE Foundation have signed a cooperation agreement to launch various corporate social responsibility projects aimed at integrating people with disabilities into the former's workforce.

The agreement, which was supported by FCC's largest shareholder, Esther Koplowitz, was signed by Pau Martí Zamora, Head of FCC Environment's Barcelona City Office, and Luis Crespo Asenjo, General Manager of ONCE Foundation.

As a result of this agreement, FCC joins the 29 companies participating in ONCE Foundation's INSERTA programme. Both entities have undertaken to foster job placement for people with disabilities, both directly (through hiring by FCC Barcelona) and indirectly (through the procurement of goods and services from ONCE Foundation's sheltered workshops).

Additionally, the FCC Barcelona city office will promote, advance and sponsor initiatives that favour hiring, job creation and training for disabled persons.

FCC will also include actions for disabled persons in its Social Responsibility plans and strategies, work towards raising awareness in this area, and implement projects that seek to improve hiring and job creation.

FCC focuses on corporate social responsibility out of a conviction that its ethical behaviour and social and environmental commitment do not arise just from the imperatives of fairness and justice but are also profitable by improving working conditions and generating relations of reciprocity and acceptance in our milieu.

Not only are people with disabilities entitled to access, in conditions of equality, to the goods and services that companies make available to the public; they are also a major stakeholder group that no leading company of FCC's calibre should ignore.