The initial letter of the procedure does not predetermine the selection criteria
Studio Legale Menichetti, in assisting a large Vicenza-based company which has numerous production facilities throughout the country, in a collective dismissal procedure of 162 redundancies, defended the aforementioned employer in the only appeal by one of the workers dismissed following the aforementioned procedure. The former employee based his appeal on the assumption that his professional profile had not been specifically indicated among the redundancies listed in the initial letter of the procedure.
The Court of Trieste, Labour Section, with sentence no. 1622/2019, rejected the appeal filed by the worker and, after explaining the different functions and characteristics of the initial communication and the closing letter of the collective dismissal procedure (the introduction of an adversarial procedure with the union representatives, the first, and the determination of the selection criteria, the second), found that the company had correctly proceeded, comparing the profiles of the entire business complex and drawing up a ranking of all the employees of the plant involved in the procedure, also explaining the specific reasons that had led to the evaluation of some professional figures, as they were considered irreplaceable for the company activity.
The Court ruled, adhering to the defensive theses formulated during the trial by the Firm, concluding: "It should be emphasised that the approach adopted, based on the distinction between the initial phase pursuant to art. 4 and the phase of choosing workers to be dismissed pursuant to art. 5, appears to be confirmed by a recent ruling by the Supreme Court with which, after indicating the purpose of the prior communication, it was noted that it is not the letter of initiation of the procedure that determines the selection criteria. Indeed, according to this Court, the communication of the beginning of the procedure ex I. no. 223/91 must not contain the indication of the criteria on the basis of which the employer will proceed to identify the workers to be made redundant, given that these criteria are of legal or contractual source, but cannot be set unilaterally by the employer, so that the employer legitimately omits the reference, also considering that these may be different at the end of the procedure aimed, among other things, precisely for the purpose of verifying the possibility of determining, by agreement with the union, the same criteria (Court of Cassation No. 1649 of 1999; Conf. Cassation No. 2516 of 1999; Cassation No. 2638 of 1999; Cassation No. 2946 of 1999; Cassation No. 13727 of 2000). Therefore, the selection criteria are established by union agreement or, secondarily, by law; only the violation of the criteria identified by these sources can determine the illegitimacy of the withdrawal and certainly not the divergence with respect to any criteria given in the opening communication, if they have not been expressly transfused into the union agreement or the communication pursuant to art. 4, co. 9, I. no. 223 of 1991 (still Cassation no. 18504 of 2016). Therefore, the preventive communication with which the employer starts the collective dismissal procedure, which must have the contents prescribed by art. 4, co. 3, I. no. 223 of 1991 but not predetermining selection criteria, essentially has the purpose of allowing the union counterparty to exercise an effective control on the planned reduction of personnel in a transparent and conscious way (among others: Cass. No. 13031 of 2002; Cass. No. 5770 of 2003, Cass. No. 15479 of 2007, Cass. No. 5034 of 2009). .... How much of the application of the selection criteria that, where not predetermined by collective agreements, must be observed in competition between them according to art. 5 of the I. no. 223 of 1991, the principle established by this Court is reiterated according to which the rule of the competition of the criteria, if it imposes a global evaluation of the same on the employer, does not exclude, however, that the comparative result could be that of granting prevalence to one of said criteria and, in particular, to the technical-productive requirements, this being the criterion more coherent with the aims pursued through the reduction of the personnel, as long as naturally such a choice is justified by objective factors, whose existence is actually proven by the employer and does not demonstrate elusive intentions or discriminatory reasons (Cass. no. 1201 of 2000; Cass. no. 14434 of 2000; Cass. no. 11866 of 2006; Cass. no. 22824 of 2009)> (Cass. 5950/18) ". (GB)
