The company agreement signed to cope with a temporary increase in activity does not expire and can be reused

The Court of Cassation, in its judgement 21390 filed on 14 August 2019, stated that a company agreement signed to deal with a temporary increase in activity does not expire unless explicitly provided for and can be reused later.

The facts

The Court of Appeals with territorial jurisdiction upheld the decision of the lower court which had rejected the request made by a worker against the employer to establish the irregularity of the manpower supply agreement and the fixed-term contract (extended several times in 2010) between them. The purpose of these contracts was “to provide assistance (handling) at the airport of (OMISSIS) for the scheduled operations during the period of the relationship, of the Airlines that were starting up and partly consolidating their activities at the airport“.

Specifically, the Court of Appeals stated that “the manpower supply contract had been concluded because of the need to deal with the temporary increase in activities deriving from the “Postal Flights” project expressly referred to in the trade union agreement of 6 December 2006 by which the social partners had defined, for this purpose, the need to use fixed-term and supply contracts and the procedures for implementing the agreed increases in staff. In this context, the reason for the fixed-term contracts had to be regarded as being sufficiently specific. The justifying reasons relating to the implementation of the Poste project were then positively reflected in the trade union agreement of 6 December 2006, in respect of which no expiry had been set, with the result that that agreement could not be regarded as automatically having ended, as the applicant claims, at the end of the 36th month following its conclusion (April 2010)”.

The employee appealed to the Court of Cassation against that decision, relying on two reasons, which the company resisted in its defence argument.

The decision of the Court of Cassation

The worker contested, inter alia, the judgement under appeal for having given validity to the Trade Union Agreement of 6 December 2006. This gave it an indefinite duration and allowed an unlimited use in time of the fixed-term contract also administered, to deal with the same business activities relating to postal flights, which the same agreement had limited in time to 2 years and 12 months.

On this point, the Court of Cassation noted that the appeal courts pointed out that “the agreement of 6 December 2006 had intervened in the start-up phases of the Postal Flights business and with it the collective parties had acknowledged that this activity entailed the need for fixed-term recruitment in relation to the contract concluded with the Poste Italiane company, agreeing on how to proceed with fixed-term recruitment or manpower supply contracts; and this without setting any deadline, even indirectly, so that it could not be considered automatically terminated in April 2010, at the end of the 36 months from the conclusion of the agreement, as claimed by the worker.

According to the Court of Cassation, the appeal courts considered that, once the contract with Poste Italiane had been renewed, the company’s need to resort to a temporary increase in staff was repeated. In light of the above, they concluded that the 2006 agreement, although signed on the occasion of the first tender contract, was still suitable for confirming that these same recruitment requirements already positively assessed by the Trade Unions continued to apply also to subsequent contracts.

In view of the above, the Court of Cassation dismissed the employee’s appeal, charging the costs of the proceedings to the party losing the case.