In the last months of 2016, a large Italian company, which provides call centre services, put in place a collective redundancy procedure, which involved employees from the Rome and Naples offices, judged economically no longer profitable.
The trade unions have agreed on the fairness of selection criteria adopted by the employer, as well as compliance by the latter with the substantive and procedural safeguards provided by Law 223/1991, but the unitary union representatives of the production unit of Rome have not signed the agreement and over 1500 workers have challenged the redundancies, challenging the decision of the former employer to limit the choice of personnel to be dismissed only within the headquarters of the capital, without considering the others, without therefore referring to the entire company organization.
Only one of the judges of the Court of Rome called to judge on cases brought by workers has agreed with them, eliminating the redundancy measures and ordering the company to reinstate the workers, on the assumption that workers made redundant should be identified on all production units and that the restriction to a single site was not justified by proven technical-productive needs, as the personnel concerned could be moved from one location to another.
The decision in question, moreover promptly challenged by the Company, is supported by a minority orientation of legitimacy (see for all, Civil Cassation, Labour Section, 30/09/2015, No. 19457), but is diametrically opposed, in the conclusions, by the measures of the other Roman judges to whom the appeals of dismissed workers were assigned, in turn supported by a consolidated legitimacy orientation according to which, in terms of collective redundancies for staff reduction, should the company restructuring project refer exclusively to a company production unit, the group of the workers concerned may be limited to employees of this unit on the basis of objective company needs and should the employer have indicated in the communication the technical-organizational reasons for this limitation, also finding the agreement of the trade union on the aforementioned prospects (see, for all, Civil Cassation, Labour Section, 07/07/2015, No. 13953) pursuant to art. 4, paragraph 3, of the law 223/1991.
Therefore, we are in the presence of a jurisprudential conflict that could soon be put together by the same Court of Rome in the opposition or even, in a near future, by the Supreme Court of Cassation. (LC)
