With judgment No. 150 lodged last 16 July, the Constitutional Court has declared article 4 of Legislative Decree No. 23 of 4 March 2015 constitutionally unlawful , with limitation to the words “for an amount equal to a monthly salary of the last pay of reference for calculating the severance pay for each year of employment”.
The constitutionality issue had been raised by the Courts of Bari and of Rome with orders dated 18 April 2019 and 9 August 2019, respectively, within the scope of legal proceedings having as subject matter the unfairness of dismissals notified in breach of the relevant procedural rules, amongst which, article 7 of Law No. 300/1970.
In the opinion of the Judges a quo, any dismissal notified in breach of the formal rules (i) shall entail the breach of mandatory provisions, established beforehand in view of ensuring the “audiatur et altera pars” principle of legal civilisation and (ii) would always take the shape of “a breach of the law which must entail ‘adequate and customised compensation’, even if by way of a lump sum”.
By aligning itself with the principles set forth in the previous judgment No. 194/2018, the Constitutional Court has found that the method for quantifying the compensation applied to those dismissals for defects of formal nature only “enhances the marginality of the formal and procedural defects, also further belittling the role of guaranteeing fundamental values of legal civilisation, aimed at protecting the worker’s personal dignity”. Indeed, such mathematical criteria does not prove to be “adequate compared to the purpose of dissuading employers from bringing about dismissals affected by formal defects”.
Furthermore, seniority of employment “neglects the assessment of the specificity of the actual case” and is unfit to disclose “the wide range of variables directly affecting the employee personally”.Therefore, it has no reasonable relation with the disvalue of the dismissal affected by formal and procedural defects, which the legislator has intended to punish and which may not be exhausted in the mere arithmetic calculation of the seniority of employment. Therefore, according to the Constitutional Court, in compliance with the minimum and maximum limit set forth by the legislator, in calculating the relevant compensation, the Judge seized must, above all, take the seniority of employment into consideration, that is “the starting point of the assessment”. In any case, in no way can the Judge set aside the application “with a properly grounded assessment” of other criteria, which contribute “in a corrective vein” to make the calculation of the compensation concerned close to the peculiarities of the specific case. Amongst these, it is worth mentioning the seriousness of the breaches, pursuant to article 18, sixth paragraph, of Law No. 300/1970, the number of people employed, the size of the company, the behaviour and the conditions of the parties, cross-referenced by article 8 of Law No. 604 of 1966.
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