The Jobs Act (Legislative Decree 81/2015) provides that starting from 1 January 2016 there will no longer be room for project contracts abolished by our legal system as early as June 2015. This provision, however, does not abolish coordinated collaborations and continuative, the old “co.co.co.” to be clear, that they will continue to exist (albeit in an increasingly restricted area) and which will regulate the authentic relationships of that type. The purpose of this chapter of the Jobs Act, in fact, is to mark a clear demarcation between employee work and self-employment (true) to avoid the use of false collaborations and fake VAT parity, but not to abolish all collaboration contracts. Adecco has calculated that from 1 January 2016 there are approximately 654.500 project contracts that are no longer valid.
What will happen now?
We asked Francesco Rotondi, professor of labor law at the Carlo Cattaneo University of Castellanza and founding partner of LabLaw, one of the leading Italian law firms specializing in labor law and industrial relations. This is the answer: "Those who were employed with a project contract but carried out, in fact, a hetero-direct and hetero-organized work relationship (i.e. exclusively personal, continuous work services whose execution methods are organized by the client also with reference to the times and places of work) must be classified with an open-ended, fixed-term or temporary employment contract. For the others, on the other hand, who carry out real self-employment, the rules of the code will apply (articles 2122 et seq.) and for the residual ones, the coordinated and continuous collaboration contract envisaged by art. 409 code of civil procedure, which no longer provides for the indication of the project. Obviously, for the latter, there should not be hetero-directed or hetero-organized working methods, otherwise they could be transformed into subordinate employment contracts, with all the connected penalties".
Furthermore, continues the lawyer, “there are a number of exceptions, and among these: collaborations regulated in the areas of national collective agreements, as in the case of call centres; the collaborations of the intellectual professions which require enrollment in orders and registers; those stipulated in the context of the public administration, even if until 1 January 2017. For these realities the exception consists in the possibility that the collaborations carried out may be hetero-organised".
“The project contract therefore disappears – concludes Rotondi – but not the coordinated and continuous collaborations that remain in our legal system and which will continue to regulate non-subordinate and non-autonomous employment relationships.
Hopefully!".
