On March 3rd, 2012, the Corriere della Sera published an interesting article by Pietro Ichino and Paolo Pinotti, on page 58. It is titled "Work tribunals, a Russian roulette. Compensation is better than a judicial outcome" but could also be titled "Abandon all hope of legal certainty ye who turn to the Labour Courts." Yes, because there is the fast one and the slow one. But above all there is the more or less partial judge. But slow and partial judges are not a few, according to statistical data reported in the excerpts of the article that we can read below. This is worth keeping in mind. Because healthy preventive realism is better than an insane posthumous disappointment.
Exerpt CORRIERE DELLA SERA dated 03.03.2012
... Research conducted on over 11,000 cases of dismissal, registered in the courts of Milan, Rome and Turin in the years 2003-2005 shows that ... the average duration of these trials is very different in the three courts: 266 days to Milan, 429 in Rome and 200 in Turin. If the causes of dismissal were similar in the three cities, it would be natural to wonder why the workers of Rome (and their employers) have to wait twice as long as those of Turin and over a third more than those of Milan to know their own fate ... . In Rome, the worker and the company assigned, by pure chance, to the fastest judge can hope to see their case decided in 179 days. These become 693 days if the case is assigned to the slower judge: an increase of almost 4 times. If, to be prudent, we want to exclude the judges who are slower or faster than 10% of their colleagues, the range varies from 284 to 569 days: an increase of over 2 times. In Milan and Turin the differences between fast and slow judges are equally great: even excluding extreme cases, we pass from 193 to 333 days in the Lombard capital and from 97 to 318 in Piedmont. For the company, the lottery generated by this gap is particularly expensive because if the judge decides in favour of the worker, the employer has to pay him or her not only the unpaid remuneration pending the trial and the related social security contributions. It has to pay INPS (National social welfare institution) a substantial fine for the omitted contributions, a fine that would change depending on the judge's decision time. Costs for workers are no less important, since the possibility of remaining without pay for 693 days instead of 179, such as happens in Rome, is at stake. However, what matters most to them is the likelihood that the appeal against the dismissal will be accepted. But even in this case, statistics show that the judicial investigation of the justified reason is Russian roulette. In Milan, the judge most favourable to the worker sides with him or her about 4 times more frequently than the less favourable judge. The uncertainty is even greater for the company: for some judges it is right in 2% of cases, for others in 20%, with an increase of 10 times. In Rome, the probability of victory of the worker however can increase 10 times depending on the judge (from 4% to 40%) while the gap for companies is more contained, but still considerable (from 4% to 19%). It is more difficult to interpret settlements, which are the most frequent outcome. But their likelihood also varies greatly among the judges, although the cases assigned to them are similar. In Milan we pass from 49% to 76% of disputes settled by court. In Rome, the difference goes from 27% to 69%. If the fraction of rulings favourable to workers given by a court is proportional to the degree to which the same judge favours settlements, we can conclude that, even considering settlements, the lottery arising from the casual allocation of cases to magistrates involves the very different probabilities of victory depending on the magistrate who deals with the trial ...
