According to the judges of the Court of Cassation, as reported by Italia Oggi, an employee’s dismissal may be justified even solely with a view to the better and more efficient productive organisation of the business or the pursuit of its greater profitability, that is, greater profit
Profit justifies dismissal. This is the new and revolutionary type of dismissal recognised for the first time in our legal system by a recent judgment of the Court of Cassation (judgment No. 25201 of 7 December 2016). It is, writes Italia Oggi, an extension of the scope of dismissal for objective justified reason (giustificato motivo oggettivo), which may now be invoked not only in “extraordinary” cases such as unfavourable economic situations, but also in “ordinary” ones in which the company decides to eliminate a function in order to increase profitability and therefore, ultimately, profit.
With the judgment under review, the judges of the court of last resort make a veritable Copernican revolution, stating for the first time and clearly that a dismissal will no longer be justified only if necessary in the face of an economic crisis, a balance-sheet loss or a fall in turnover that severely tests, if not actually endangers, the company’s performance. The dismissal of an employee, according to the judges of the Court of Cassation, may be justified even solely with a view to the better and more efficient productive organisation of the business or the pursuit of its greater profitability: in other words, greater profit.
In other words, from now on, in order to be lawful, dismissal for objective justified reason will no longer have to be regarded as the extrema ratio but as one of the possible outcomes of the entrepreneur’s organisational and decision-making autonomy, which is withdrawn from the scrutiny of the labour judge (whose sole task will be to verify in concrete terms the existence of the reason put forward by the company and the causal link between that reason and the dismissal of that particular employee).
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