Collective dismissals: the conditions to limit them to certain corporate departments (Newsletter Norme & Tributi n. 168 Camera di Commercio Italo-Germanica – Vittorio De Luca, Luca Cairoli)

Under the law that regulates dismissals in Italy, specific selection criteria must be applied in identifying the relevant employees, throughout the entire corporate group. However, according to well-established case-law, recently confirmed by the Court of Cassation, Labour Division, judgment No. 3511 of 6 February 2023, at certain conditions, an employer may limit the pool of employees involved in a staff reduction, even only to those employed in a certain department, sector or unit of the company. In particular, according to the Court, the needs that may justify such restriction must be consistent with the information provided by the employer in the official notification of the proposed collective redundancy process; this is to allow the trade unions to verify that: (i) the staff are actually being made redundant for reasons strictly related to the units, departments or sectors concerned, as indicated by the employer; (ii) the roles performed by the employees involved in the redundancy are not interchangeable with those of employees assigned to other departments or corporate units not involved in the restructuring.