Court of Cassation: the concept of production unit for the applicability of real guarantees

With sentence no. 15211 dated 22 July 2016, the Court of Cassation upheld the decision of the lower courts, affirming that where a workplace coincides with the home of the employee, for the purposes of ascertaining if the size of the workplace is such as to require reinstatement of the worker, if unfairly dismissed, pursuant to Article 18 of the Workers Charter, the workplace and company premises should be deemed one and the same. The production unit should be considered not all headquarters, establishments, branches, offices or departments but only the largest company premises which, even if comprising various locations, some in different city or town authorities, in entrepreneurial terms are technically and administratively independent, in such a way as to fully carry out a work cycle or part of an essential production process. Hence, in the opinion of the Court, premises with a certain degree of administrative autonomy, used only instrumentally or to carry out supplementary functions in relation to the general purposes of the company or for some of its activities, should not deemed production units. A home, used by an employee as his/her workplace, is not an independent production unit and hence real guarantees in the event of unfair dismissal are applicable.