La giustificazione del licenziamento disciplinare

The justification of disciplinary dismissal The thesis examines the subject of disciplinary dismissal, that is of the kind of dismissal which is caused by the worker’s breach of contract. In particular, the paper first goes deep into the various interpretative theories about nature and foundation of the employer’s disciplinary power, pointing out before all its uniquity in the range of contractual relations, since it enables the employer to take unilaterally disciplinary measures against the worker who has been responsible for breaches of contract. It must be noticed that especially in the second half of the last century Italian labour legislation progressively set several limits, both substantial and procedural, to the employer’s power of dismissal, in order to avoid adding a situation of legal subjection to the employer’s disciplinary power to the condition of social and economic weakness of the worker (who offers his work done to the owner of the means of production to support himself and his family). Furthermore, the paper states the remedies provided for by Italian labour law to sanction unlawful dismissals, considers the foundation of each remedy and analyses the legislative measures recently taken by Italian Government. In this connection, for nearly fourty years the worker’s means of protection have been kept more or less unchanged; because of the reforms begun in 2012, however, margins for application of the remedy of “reinstatement in job” (“reintegrazione nel posto di lavoro”) got much narrower, or even don’t exist nearly any more. Consequently, quite new interpretative problems have arisen from this, which could even question the foundations themselves of the whole matter.