Contacts

The Supreme Court, in ruling no. 1099 of Jan. 14, 2022, returned to rule on the probationary agreement, which, according to Art. 2096 Civil Code, can be affixed to the contract of employment.
Such a covenant must be in writing ad substantiam, prior to or concurrent with the hiring, and indicate precisely the duties assigned to the worker, with the consequence that, in the absence of these two requirements, the covenant must be considered null and void and the hiring final.
The codictic norm does not set a maximum duration of the trial, which, normally, is established by collective labor agreements; a maximum duration (of six months) is, however, indirectly provided by Art. 10 of Law No. 604/1966, which, for probationary workers, provides for the extension of protection against dismissal when the employment becomes definite and, in any case, when six months have elapsed since the beginning of the employment relationship.
During the probationary period, either party may freely terminate, without notice, the contract, unless a minimum duration of the probation is agreed upon.
In the wake of the well-established jurisprudential orientation – according to which the specific indication of the duties that the worker is called upon to perform can also be made Per relationem, that is, by reference to the declarations of the contract collective which define the duties included in the hiring qualification, provided that the referral is sufficiently specific i.e. “fact to the more detailed notion than the definitional scale of categories, qualifications, levels and job profiles contained therein” (Cass. 9597/2017; Cass. 16587/2017) – the Supreme Court’s recent pronouncement, in recalling that “the specificity is functional to the proper experience of the probationary period and the evaluation of its outcome, which must be carried out in relation to the performance and duties of assignment as identified in the individual contract’, considers legitimate “a definition by reference to the declaratory statement of the collective agreement, only where the reference is sufficiently specific and referable to the most detailed classificatory notion, so that, if the category of a given level amalgamates a plurality of profiles, the indication of the individual profile is necessary, while that of the category alone would be generic“. (EP – GB)