The dismissal of individual workers in certain cases which are justified in Article 3 of Law number 604, 1966, can be considered to be legitimate even when the company is not suffering from economic difficulties.
Indeed, when a company dismisses workers it doesn’t necessarily have to be based on the fact that business is low, because, if a company wants to reduce its workforce, sufficient grounds for such dismissal can simply be the desire to increase productivity or improve the organization of production, or even to improve the organization of management, or even yet to simply make the company more profitable.
Recently published Sentence number 29238 of the Italian Supreme Court, which came out on December 6, 2017, confirms this orientation, which had already been expressed during the previous year in Decision number 25201/2017.
However, for a company to reduce its workforce it has to have proper grounds to do so. For example, if a company simply tries to be more careful and decides to face negative economic factors or perhaps extraordinary expenditures by dismissing people, and the judge decides that such reasons are not sufficient, then the dismissal can be considered as illegitimate, if he thinks that the reasons given by the company are not true.
