Reversal in sight in labor lawsuits. The Constitutional Court has in fact declared illegitimate article 3, paragraph 1, of Legislative Decree n.23/2015 on the open-ended employment contract with increasing protections, better known as the Jobs Act, in the part that rigidly determines the indemnity due to the unjustly dismissed worker. In particular, the provision of an indemnity that increases solely on the basis of the worker's length of service (two months' compensation for each year spent at work) is, according to the Court, contrary to the principles of reasonableness and equality and contrasts with the right and protection of work enshrined in articles 4 and 35 of the Constitution. And therefore it will be the labor judge, each time, to establish whether and to what extent an unjustifiably dismissed worker should be compensated.
The sentence, with related reasons, will be filed by the Consulta in the coming weeks. The offending law, moreover, was among them not modified by the subsequent Law Decree n.87/2018, the so-called "Dignity Decree", signed by Luigi Di Maio, Minister of Welfare in the new executive who took office this year. The subsequent provision was limited to specifying that the compensation for the worker dismissed without just cause must be equal to a minimum of six months and can reach a maximum of 36.
The consequences of the decision are not yet clear, but will in all likelihood be very far-reaching: the main one being that the judges will be able to decide the amount of the compensation with greater autonomy that employers will have to pay their unjustifiably dismissed employees. And above all, the consequences will affect not only future decisions, but also those with pending dismissal cases.
Therefore, employers they will no longer be able to accurately predict the cost of dismissal of one of their employees on the basis of his seniority. Therefore, a person hired recently could be entitled to a very high compensation if the judge deems the dismissal particularly unjustified, while a long-term employee could receive a lower compensation than he would receive today if the dismissal were to result at least partially justified.
