NO DISCRIMINATION
Being short is no obstacle to being a train conductor
The Supreme Court reassures vertically challenged workers by ruling that they can perform duties such as being the service manager on trains, even those who are less than one metre sixty in height. This is evident from sentence no. 25734 of 15-11-2013, with which the work section of the Court of Appeal gave the right to a woman, who, despite having passed the selection process for the role involving the performance of these functions, was then deemed unfit for the role by Trenitalia for her evident «insufficiency of stature ».
By confirming The Appeals Court a sentence of appeal that had reversed the first degree, recognized the right of women to be hired as a train service manager, considering that the regulatory sources related to the tables on physical requirements for various professional profiles in which the minimum height for train managers and conductors was established as 1.6m, were "secondary and, therefore, the ordinary judge was allowed to evaluate their legitimacy incidentally and eventually disregard them".
This regulatory provision, providing for a single minimum size requirement for both men and women, violated Articles 3 and 37 of the Constitution, because, as declared by the Constitutional Court in 1993, it carried out indirect discrimination against female candidates.
Any regulation which, in recruitment competitions establishes a physical limitation for access to selection must meet a criterion of reasonableness, both in the public sector, given the constitutional principles of non-discrimination based on physical diversity and the impartiality of the public administration, and in the private sector, in which the selection criteria must respond to the principles of correctness and good faith.
DISCRIMINATION - YES
The State Council considers the height requirements in job applications for fire service crew to be reasonable.
However, the Council of State does not seem to think the same way (ruling 3-12-2013 No. 5739), according to which a fire service personnel cannot be less than 1.65 metres in height.
The administrative judge rejected the appeal presented by a volunteer who was excluded from the selection procedure to cover vacant posts in the Fire Department because she did not reach the minimum height required in the call for tenders (the usual 1.56 m).
To the female worker who complained of indirect discrimination against women, as a lower level rule, the Council of State replied that both men and women must be taller than 165cm and therefore there is no gender discrimination (an argument which is distinguished by simplicity but not by depth of analysis), stating however that the height requirement is to be considered reasonable in relation to the particular work to which the fire service personnel are called: considered a "very special" activity for which "the exception to the prohibition of discriminating people in relation to their stature is right and necessary, as the awareness that the ordinary activity of fire service personnel (in relation to fires but also to other accidents and disasters that require intervention) requires by its nature a certain physical presence, far more than is required, for example, law enforcement officers, belongs to common knowledge and experience , ... ".
