The “new” 2103 of the Italian Civil Code: Stricter repêchage obligation

The Court of Milan, with judgement No. 3370, filed on 16 December 2016, has stated that the employer, in case of dismissal for financial reasons, in verifying whether to assign the employee to other tasks within the company (the so called repêchage obligation) cannot limit itself to tasks equivalent to the ones performed by the extra worker, but must consider all the tasks that can fall within the same legal job level and category. This because the amendments to article 2103 of the Italian Civil Code introduced by the Jobs Act, led to overcome the notion of equivalence of tasks that represented in the past the binding parameter on whose basis the employer assigned new tasks to its employees. Therefore, if on the one hand the “new” wording of article 2013 of the Italian Civil Code made more flexible the organization of work for the company, on the other hand it has introduced stricter obligations in the verification of “repêchage”.