The New Skills Fund, introduced by the Relaunch Decree and refinanced by the August Decree, is one of the measures foreseen to deal with the Covid-19 epidemic. The Fund, set up at the National Agency for Active Employment Policies (ANPAL), can be accessed by companies that have entered into agreements with trade unions to reschedule working hours to manage the company’s changing organisational and production needs or promote reallocation of workers. In a Decree dated 22 January 2021, the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies, in agreement with the Ministry of Economy and Finance, extended the deadline for entering into trade union agreements and submitting ANPAL the applications to access the Fund to 30 June 2021. On 17 February 2021, ANPAL published Directorial Decree no. 69, implementing the new deadlines and modifying those for the preliminary investigation phase to allow the completion of activities, including expenditure, by 31 December 2021. There was a great deal of expectation from companies, as the previous deadline to enter such agreements had expired on 31 December. This year, the collective agreements must provide training projects, the number of employees involved and the number of hours of working time allocated to training courses (the maximum limit remains 250 hours).
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The Court of Cassation, with ruling No. 16571/2018 has once again returned – confirming an already consolidated trend in legal literature and case law concerning lawfulness – on the topic of reclassification of the apprenticeship relationship in an employment relation under an open term contract, if the employer’s obligations to provide training was breached. In particular, the Court has pointed out that in the matter filed for review, the necessary professional training was lacking, that is the professional training provided to the employee in-training required to allow him to become qualified. On the matter, the Court states once again that in an apprenticeship contract the fundamental matter is specifically represented by the obligation of the employer to provide effective professional training with the goal of providing to the trainee a professional qualification. And since this breach, being of no little importance, leads in the opinion of the Court of Cassation to the transformation right from its inception of the apprenticeship contract into an open term contract, with consequent payment to the employee of all the contributions and salary differences. This means that the priority role that the training undertakes respect to the work activity excludes that this specific contractual form be deemed suitable a relationship having as its objective the performance of elementary or routine tasks, not integrated by an effective training both theoretical and in practice, under penalty of reclassifying the relationship into an open term contract since the very beginning.
