At a distance of a week, the Supreme Court has intervened with two different judgments on the cd. “Obligation to repechage”: which provides for the employer the obligation to assign an employee in similar tasks or lower tasks, as an alternative to dismissal for justified objective, ie, “for reasons relating to production, organization of work and the regular functioning of it “(art. 3, L.604 / 1966).

In its judgment No. 19775 of 4th October 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that if the employer is a company belonging to a group, this requirement will be extended to other group companies only if they constitute between them a single business complex. Among the companies in the group there must be a real organizational and functional uniformity: it must be a single set of assets and elements articulated in a suitable way to carry out production of the entire group. If the group’s companies are, however, functionally independent of each other, the fired employee in a company cannot be relocated elsewhere within other group companies.

In its judgment No. 20436 of 11th October 2016, the Supreme Court rejected the ruling of the Court of appeal, stating that the burden of proof to make the repechage is incumbent only on the employer. In the past, in fact, a different caselaw claimed that the employee has a kind of duty of cooperation with the employer in order to prove the impossibility of repechage. For the employee, the Court states, it would be almost impossible to adequately know the whole business situation, making it very difficult the allegation of evidence to prove this impossibility.