With judgment no. 7190 of 18 March 2024, the Italian Court of Cassation addressed the issue of the validity of a resignation submitted by an employee under threat of dismissal by the employer.

The employee initiated legal proceedings to have his resignation declared null and, in the alternative, void and to obtain a finding that the employment relationship had continued without interruption, with the right to the salaries accrued in the meantime. This was on the grounds that he had been forced to submit a letter of resignation completed under the duress from two company managers, who threatened him with prejudicial consequences. The Italian Court of Cassation ruled that if an employer was not entitled to dismiss an employee due to the non-existence of the alleged breach, the resignation tendered by the employee under threat of dismissal can be annulled on the grounds of moral unfairness. In this case, the worker’s resignation is based on intimidating and objectively unfair conduct, which constitutes psychological coercion and revokes consent.

With Judgment no. 12632/2021 of 12 May 2021, the Court of Cassation once again addressed the issue of employee transfer due to environmental incompatibility in the workplace, ruling out that this amounts to mobbing if the transfer is not intended to persecute the employee, rather to restore serenity in the workplace. The ruling derives from a case brought by a commander of the Ancona Municipal police force to obtain compensation for damages suffered as a result of persecutory conduct of the Municipality, which had ultimately transferred the commander to a different office. The Court of Appeal of Ancona, confirming the decision of the first instance court, held that the claimant’s requests were groundless; specifically, it held that the transfer had taken place “in a situation of difficult interpersonal relations which exacerbated tensions and problems to the extent that it certainly represented a condition of environmental incompatibility”. The claimant appealed against this decision before the Court of Cassation. The Court, with order no. 26684/2017, partially upheld the appeal and referred the case back to the Court of Appeal of Ancona, which, considering the shortcomings in the motivation, was to proceed with a new assessment of the case in accordance with the principles of law referred to by the Court of Cassation whereby “the qualifying element of mobbing is not the lawfulness or unlawfulness of individual acts, rather the persecutory intent that unifies them, which must be proven by the person who claims to have suffered the harassing conduct and which the trial judge must ascertain or exclude, taking into account all the circumstances of the case”.

Continue reading the full version published on Il Quotidiano del Lavoro of Il Sole 24 Ore.