THEIpsos announced a referendum voter survey of June 8 and 9 (4 on work and 1 on citizenship) from which (see table) the failure of the quorum is clear and therefore the invalidity of the consultation.
As the date of the ballot box approaches, the controversies intensify, almost always one-sided; that is, it's the Cgil (who presented the questions and collected the signatures) and who enlisted the left in the enterprise, which is agitated in the indifference of the majority parties, who gave indications for the non-participation in the vote.
As often happens there was some slip-up that provided a bit of oxygen to the opposition “crying in the desert”: the President of the Senate Ignazio La Russa, forgetting his institutional role, declared that will campaign for voters to stay at home. In the previous days the controversy had targeted the entire majority, guilty of attacking democracy for the position taken on the vote, as if the custom of boycotting referendums had not become established taking advantage of the positional income guaranteed by not voting due to the failure to reach the quorum.
In the referendum on the radical-league questions on justice, the PD gave freedom of vote, while the DS in 2003, with Piero Fassino as secretary, gave the indication of the I don't vote on a question from the Cgil on Article 18 of the Statute. In 2017, when the referendum on offshore drilling was voted on, the Prime Minister and Secretary of the PD Matteo Renzi claimed the legitimacy of the abstention, defining the referendum “a hoax”. Similar theses were also expressed by the President Emeritus of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, defending the right to abstention and judging the initiative “inconsistent and specious”.
Then – let's be honest – we found out that Not voting is a right like voting, the question shifts to the political level. However negative one may have an opinion of the leaders of the majority parties, it is difficult to imagine that they are so naive as to give away – sending voters to the polls – the achievement of the quorum and a victory for yes to the trade union and political opposition on rules for which the centre right bears no responsibility because it is almost all the work of centre-left governments led by the reformists of the Democratic Party.
No one can argue that the government would suffer a defeat in the event of a victory for the "yes" vote and this is precisely what happens the majority's lack of involvement in weakening the referendums, initially thought of as corollaries of the referendum on the Calderoli law (whose abrogative question was not admitted by the Constitutional Court), which would have certainly produced a greater mobilization of both minority and majority forces.
A losing battle between Landini, Schlein and the Jobs Act
Ma Landini “left him alone”. He found solidarity only in Elly Schlein, who he decided to involve the Democratic Party in a losing battle, for unclear reasons.
Il the government has not even commissioned – as usually happens – theState Attorney of an ex officio defense of the rules under referendum in a hearing at the Constitutional Court, because it is a conflict entirely internal to the left: a revenge by Maramaldo Landini against Matteo Renzi alias Francesco Ferrucci and his government.
The Reactionary Left (copyright Tony Blair) wants to erase what was done by reformist left while he was in government. The Saracen of the carousel is the jobs act which is the name assumed (in the metaphor of a part for the whole, since the "package" contains other legislative decrees) by the legislative decree n.23/2015 which established the contract with increasing protections. An institution already weakened in its main innovative contents in the matter of dismissal by a questionable jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court, so much so that the judges of the laws, in admitting the question, went so far as to underline its practical uselessness.
In fact, we suggest to anyone who wants to get a complete and impartial idea of downloading from the web the judgment no. 12 of 7 January 2025 with which the judges of the laws admitted the referendum questions.
The Constitutional Court dismantles the myth of the return to Article 18
Before moving on to the paraphrase of the sentence, Let's try to summarize the meaningThe Consulta states that it could not have do not admit the questions since all the required requisites were present, but he goes so far as to underline its practical uselessness, as if he wanted to warn the electorate that they run the risk of expressing their opinion on a misunderstanding caused by “misleading advertising”; or to believe in the reinstatement – in the event of a victory for the Yes – of the legendary article 18 of the Workers' Statute, while this effect would not exist. “The promoters note, in particular, that the repeal of Legislative Decree no. 23 of 2015 would determine – it is written in the sentence of 7 January 2025 – the re-expansion of the discipline referred to in art. 18 of Law 20 May 1970, no. 300. In the event of repeal of Legislative Decree no. 23, however, the uniform discipline of dismissal would become that established, in the amended article 18, by Law no. 92/2012 (the Fornero reform of the labor market), which, in the case of dismissal for justified objective (economic) illegitimate reasons, has already called into question the sanction of reinstatement, assuming economic compensation as a general fact. The Court then recalls all previous decisions adopted to amend the provisions of decree no. 23/2015 for the purpose of greater protection of the worker and lists the cases in which the approval of the repeal question would determine a reduction in the protection itself.
Form:
Amendments for the purpose of greater protection of the worker resulting from rulings of the Constitutional Court
On the indemnity protection they engraved the judgments no. 194 of 2018 and no. 150 of 2020, as a result of which the automatic calculation of the compensation envisaged only for dismissals subject to Legislative Decree no. 23 of 2015 has ceased to exist, which "is now set within a range between a minimum and a maximum and is no longer quantified in a rigid manner solely according to the linear progression of seniority of service" (ruling no. 7 of 2024).
As for the reinstatement protection, the sentence no. 22 of 2024, with which this Court declared the unconstitutionality of art. 2, paragraph 1, of Legislative Decree no. 23 of 2015 due to excessive delegation, limited to the word "expressly", has achieved a significant expansion of the scope of application of "full" reinstatement protection: as a result of this ruling, in fact, the regime of null dismissal given to employees hired after 7 March 2015 now applies both in the case in which the violated mandatory provision contains the express and textual sanction of nullity, and in the case where this is not expressly provided for, but it is possible to find, in any case, the imperative nature of the prescription due to the presence of a prohibition on dismissal when certain conditions are met.
Finally, the sentence no. 128 of 2024 declared the constitutional illegitimacy of art. 3, paragraph 2, of the legislative decree under examination, in the part in which it does not provide that the "attenuated" reinstatement protection, reserved therein only for cases of disciplinary dismissal based on an inexistent fact, applies, in place of the merely compensatory protection originally provided for, also in cases of dismissal for objective justified reasons in which the inexistence of the material fact alleged by the employer is directly demonstrated in court, with respect to which any evaluation regarding the relocation of the worker remains extraneous.
The reduced protections for workers that would result from the total repeal of decree no. 23/2015
It remains, however, that, in contrast to the general reduction in guarantees in favour of the outbound flexibility, the provisions of Legislative Decree no. 23 of 2015 in some particular cases entail an expansion of the same.
This occurs in the hypothesis of dismissal given for the continuation of absences due to illness or injury of the worker before the so-called sick leave period has expired (art. 2110, second paragraph, civil code, following the aforementioned ruling no. 22 of 2024 of this Court) and in those cases in which the judge finds that the dismissal given due to the physical or mental disability of the worker is unjustified because the unsuitability to carry out the tasks assigned to him “was not [in reality] attributable to a condition of disability” (Court of Cassation, labor section, ruling of 22 May 2024, no. 14307). In these cases, in fact, “full” reinstatement protection is guaranteed, rather than the “attenuated” one provided for by art. 18 of the workers' statute.
Equally favorable is theextension of the discipline dictated by Legislative Decree no. 23 of 2015 (art. 9, paragraph 2) to dismissals initiated by so-called trend organizations, excluded instead from the scope of application of art. 18 of the workers' statute.
Conclusions
Il referendum question – underlines the Court – aims to remove from the legal system the entire legislative decree no. 23 of 2015, the result of a discretionary legislative policy option, without the see you repeal a precluded revival of the pre-existing regulatory framework may arise. In essence – the Court states – it is not true that in the event of a referendum victory we will return to the glories of Article 18; it is true, however, that in these ten years the constitutional jurisprudence had demolished in many aspects the permanent contract with increasing protections and that if the referendum were to pass there would be more disadvantages than greater protections for workers.
La Court's distancing becomes even more evident in the following passage of the sentence:
"The circumstance that, following the approval of the repeal question, the result of an expansion of the guarantees for the worker would not actually occur in all cases of invalidity, because in some particular cases there would be, instead, a reduction in protection, does not assume a dimension such as to undermine the clarity, homogeneity and the very univocity of the question itself. This calls, in fact, the electorate to a comprehensive and general evaluation, which can also ignore the specific and different regulatory provisions, without losing its unitary matrix, which remains that of expressing itself for or against the repeal of Legislative Decree no. 23 of 2015 in its detailed formulation".
In other words: you brought trouble on yourselves; we could not prevent it because the formal aspects of the referendum were regular; if one day you should realize that they deceived you on your expectations, do not take it out on us who warned you.
