Legislative Decree No. 23/2015 survived the recent referendum on June 8 and 9, which, with a turnout of 30.6 percent, did not reach a quorum. The result is not surprising, but the repeal of Legislative Decree No. 23/2015 would, in any case, have been of little consequence from the point of view of the protections offered to workers.
Recall that the system of ‘increasing protections’ was born, as part of the 2014 labor market reform, to create an organic discipline of the sanctioning apparatus of illegitimate dismissals announced, both by employers with more than 15 employees and by those ‘sub-threshold’, to workers hired since March 7, 2015. In the intentions of the legislature, the reform was supposed to come into force gradually being, precisely, intended to apply only to new employment relationships initiated from that date.
Compared to Article 18 of the Workers’ Statute, which had already been deeply amended by the ‘Fornero Reform’ in 2012, Legislative Decree No. 23/2015 aimed to introduce a new system of protections based on two principles. The first, the introduction of a compensation indemnity increasing according to the length of service of the employee concerned and, the second, the limitation of the scope of application of reinstatement protection. In fact, the reform in question had provided, in line with the disciplines adopted in Germany and Spain, a rigid mathematical formula parameterized by seniority, to eliminate the discretion of judges in determining compensatory indemnities.
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