In a judgment of 10 April 2024, the Court of Campobasso dealt with a topic that, in recent years, has assumed ever greater importance in our legal system, namely the identification of national collective bargaining agreements signed by the “most representative trade union”.
In a context in which Italian legislation refers, more and more frequently, to the provisions of national collective bargaining agreements entered into with the most representative trade unions, the correct identification of which sector collective agreement applies, from time to time, in the specific case, is fundamental but, at the same time, not always easy.
This complex interpretative process has been undertaken by Italian case law, which, over the years, has identified the following as the indicators of most representative
(i) the membership numbers of the trade union organisations,
(ii) a presence equally spread over different production sectors,
(iii) a nationwide organisation (considering the scope and distribution of the relevant organisational structures), as well as
(iv) actual participation, on a continuous and regular basis, in collective bargaining (i.e. participation in the preparation and signing of national collective bargaining agreements) and in the settlement of individual, multiple and collective employment disputes.
However, these indicators have not always allowed quick and easy identification of the most representative unions and the consequent identification of the applicable collective bargaining agreement.
In this framework, the judgment under discussion, recalling the case law principles set out above, supplemented the legal reasoning by applying an easily verifiable objective criterion, which – data in hand – takes into account the trade union-contractual system of reference, rather than the characteristics of the individual signatory trade union organisation.
In this case, the Court of Campobasso was called upon to settle a dispute relating to the application of the “CCNL Terziario Confcommercio” (national collective bargaining agreement of third sector Confcommercio) in place of the (allegedly unrepresentative) “CCNL Anpit-Cisal”. The Court stated that “where there are several national collective agreements for the same category, it is necessary to identify the so-called leader contract” and that “to establish the most or less representative, it is not the CCNL that must be considered but rather the parties, both on the employer and employee sides”.
Therefore, under this judgment, the assessment of most representative concerns both parties, i.e. the workers’ union delegation, on the one hand, and that of the companies, on the other. In other words, the assessment of comparative representativeness must be carried out by considering not a single trade union organisation, but the entire trade union structure (of workers and companies) that participates in the regulation of a given contractual system.
Continue reading the full version published on Norme e Tributi Plus Diritto of Il Sole 24 Ore.
