A settlement agreement must provide for specific waivers

With its judgement no. 20976/2017, the Court of Cassation maintained that a provision signed by the parties at the time of the early termination of employment, whereby an employer agrees to pay a gross amount as an adjustment to the employee severance indemnity, in exchange for the employee waiving his/her right to any other disputes regarding the computation of the employee severance indemnity as a whole, is tantamount to a mere acquittal with no extinctive effect on any future claims of such employee in regard to – as in the case at hand – the impact of overtime work on the severance indemnity.  The Court of Cassation, endorsing the interpretation of the trial judge, has confirmed that the payment of an amount “for the mere purpose of averting the risk of any disputes that might arise in connection with the computation of the seniority indemnity as at 31 May 1982 and of the severance indemnity as a whole“ is not an effective waiver on the part of the employee, as it contains no reference to the computation of the compensation of overtime work, but it merely contains a generic reference to the seniority indemnity accrued as at 31 May 1982 and to the severance indemnity, which is completely insufficient to root in the employee the awareness to waive demand of the aforementioned computation. In this way, the Court of Cassation has confirmed the case-law approach whereby a final acquittal signed by a worker containing a waiver, in generic terms, of several hypothetical rights in relation to the employment relationship and to its termination, may have the value of waiver or settlement only if it has been ascertained “also in light of the interpretation of the document or due to the co-occurrence of other specific circumstances that can be inferred from another source” that it has been issued being aware of assessed or objectively assessable rights and consciously intending to waive or settle them; otherwise, said statements are tantamount to boilerplate clauses and, therefore, per se are insufficient to prove a real existence of the will of the interested party to provide in this sense.