Dismissal of an employee who abuses of the internet is lawful

The Court of Cassation, with judgement No. 14862 dated 15 June 2017, declared lawful the disciplinary dismissal (while confirming the conversion performed by the court of appeal from dismissal for just cause to dismissal for a justified subjective reason) ordered to an employee who used the corporate Internet connection for personal purposes in a systematic manner (specifically 47 connections within 60 days for a total duration of 45 hours). In so doing, the employee has, in the opinion of the Court, violated the obligations of loyalty, fairness and good faith underlying a standard employment relationship.  In this context, the Court of Cassation also noted that there was no violation of the right to the employee’s privacy, since the company “limited itself to verifying the existence of undue access to the network and related connection times, without carrying out any analysis of the sites visited by the employee during navigation or the type of data downloaded.” Similarly, also it did not consider any of the above an infringement of Article 4 of the Workers’ Charter. This is because such a violation exists when the monitoring concerns the implementation of the task but not the verification of any unlawful conduct of the employee that may damage the company’s equity, undermining its normal operation.