Court of Cassation: the repêchage obligation does not impose the assignment to lower jobs

By way of judgment No. 9467/2016 the Court of Cassation has stated that the dismissal for justified objective grounds is lawful if the employer gives “evidence as to both the fact that the dismissal may be specifically referred to initiatives related to actual productive and organisational reasons, and as to the impossibility to use the worker for other jobs compatible with the held status, in connection with the specific professional content of the activity to which the worker had been previously assigned”. The above since the employer has no “obligation to offer all jobs to the worker, including those which are totally incompatible with the previously carried out jobs”. In short, in the event of company reorganisation with a concomitant suppression of a certain position and in offering a different – and even lower – job to the worker concerned, the employer must in any event assess the uniformity and compatibility of the new tasks compared to those originally carried out.