The Constitutional Court still intervenes on article18

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The Constitutional Court still intervenes on art. 18: reinstatement and manifest lack of justified objective reason

With sentence no. 125/2022 of 19 May 2022, exactly 10 years after the Fornero law (l. 92/2012), the Constitutional Court has returned to rule on art. 18 St. Lav., Intervening on one of the most controversial aspects of the law, as then modified by the reform. The sentence has in fact declared unconstitutional art. 18, seventh paragraph, second sentence, in the part in which this provision provided for the reinstatement – in the case of unlawful dismissal for justified objective reason – only in the event of “manifest non-existence” of the reason given. The law, on the other hand, only recognized economic protection (from 12 to 24 months) in the “less striking” cases of dismissal supported by an unlawful objective reason, precisely “not manifest”. The Court therefore focused on this diversity of protection,

The question of legitimacy was raised by the Labor Judge of Ravenna with an order of 6 May 2021, as part of an opposition proceedings brought by the employer according to the “Fornero rite” against an order of the same Court which – in one case dismissal for justified reason – had sentenced him to reinstate the worker. The opposition was based precisely on the alleged non-manifest non-existence of the objective reason adduced: hence the relevance of the question in the judgment a quo . As briefly highlighted in the factual part of the Court’s ruling, some aspects of the affair which are the subject of this judgment a quomade the dismissal examined, and the relative opposition, particularly problematic: in fact, the worker, within a few months, had been fired twice for just cause and once for justified objective reason, always being reinstated. This would suggest a strong conflict of relations between the parties, and the plausible instrumentality of the objective reason adduced.  

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