With the implementing decrees of the Jobs act, approved by the Council of Ministers on 11 June last, the Government has rearranged the types of existing employment contracts. The new regulation introduces some significant innovations in terms of hiring, but also leaves room for numerous uncertainties. The question that all companies ask themselves is: What changes with the latest implementing decrees? What types of contracts will be available for new hires? What changes for existing contracts? In this in-depth article we try to clarify what changes for fixed-term and permanent subordinate contracts.
PERMANENT-TERM EMPLOYMENT CONTRACTS
Article 1 of the implementing decree of the Jobs act reads: "The employment contract for an indefinite period constitutes the common form of employment relationship". It is essentially the programmatic manifesto of the reorganization of employment contracts which aims to make permanent contracts more attractive for companies intending to hire. From 2016 January XNUMX, the permanent contract will not undergo any changes.
In fact, the main innovations on permanent contracts introduced by the Jobs act entered into force in March with the new regulations on layoffs and tax relief provided for new hires. Second the lawyer Giuseppe Cucurachi of the Nunziante Magrone law firm the combined provisions of the amendments on layoffs and tax relief make the permanent contract very attractive. "Right now if I were an entrepreneur - the lawyer confesses - I would probably resort to a permanent job rather than other contractual forms, due to the simplicity of managing the relationship and lower costs".
FIXED-TERM EMPLOYMENT CONTRACTS
The implementing decrees of the Jobs act intervene on the fixed-term contract mainly to clarify and simplify some aspects of the previous regulation. No change on the expiration of the fixed-term contract: if stipulated for a period of less than 36 months, the contract can be extended up to 5 times and for a total duration of up to 36 months. The maximum legal limit also remains the number of fixed-term contracts to be entered into in the company equal to 20% of the number of permanent workers in force on 1 January of the year of employment.
If this percentage is exceeded, however, the Jobs act does not provide for the mandatory transformation of the contract into an open-ended contract, only the sanction remains paid by the employer calculated as 50% of the monthly salary received by the employee. In this case, it is an important novelty, the reason explained by the lawyer Cucurachi: "If the employer hired a number of fixed-term workers exceeding the quantitative threshold of 20%, he automatically found himself with a temporary worker moreover, today however, he only runs the risk of a sanction. By making a cost-benefit assessment, an employer could also decide to exceed that threshold and face possible penalties. I do not exclude – continues the lawyer – that there may be a future in which even here, as in England, there may be a very significant number of fixed-term workers”.
In conclusion, therefore, the latest implementing decrees of the Jobs act do not modify the permanent contract, but only the subordinated fixed-term contract for which automatic transformation into permanent is no longer envisaged if the 20% limit is exceeded. “Compared to the dozens of precarious contractual forms that the legislator had hypothesized a decade ago, today we are faced with 5-6 contractual forms, in this respect there has been a simplification – underlines the lawyer Giuseppe Cucurachi. Within the contractual typologies, today we have a fixed-term contract which until last year was the most flexible and most interesting contract for an organisation. But today, as long as there are reliefs for open-ended contracts, of those six types of contract it is the most convenient. Now we have a few types of contract and the main one, the most interesting, is certainly the permanent contract".
