The point on employment

Staff leasing, less constraints on thresholds and contract grounds

Possible to exceed the 30 per cent share of contract workers in the total number of employees. Relief on contributions for the Mezzogiorno applicable

by Giampiero Falasca

27 December 2024

Aggiungi Il Sole 24 Ore
ai preferiti su Google

3' min read

3' min read

With only a few days to go before the approval of the employment supplement, and close to the approval of the Budget law, the world of administration is beginning to come to terms with the novelties contained in the supplement. Without forgetting to keep in mind the indications of the Budget law, starting with the decontribution South that also applies to temporary employment.

All of this within a numerical perimeter (see Il Sole of 13 November) that recorded 147,000 workers on temporary contracts with indefinite-term contracts in June 2024, i.e. a +4% on the same month of the previous year; on the other hand, there was a drop in the number of determinate contracts (-6.8%).

This means that the total number of workers through the agency came close to half a million in the same period (499,000, -3.8% compared to June 2023). And so the changes contained in Article 10 of the reform law, while not distorting the existing discipline, have the obvious purpose of adapting the conditions of use of agency work to the insertion or reinsertion needs of certain specific types of workers.

Agencies

The first novelty concerns the elimination of the rule that allowed workers hired on an open-ended basis by employment agencies to be administered also in the context of fixed-term assignments, for periods of more than 24 months (the so-called 'stabilisation'); the use of this contractual combination was envisaged until 30 June 2025, but now this option has been cancelled before the deadline. This does not mean, however, that this particular form of administration becomes unlawful: it is the same collegato Lavoro that confirms its normal usability, when it includes open-ended employment contracts, used for fixed-term missions, among the forms of administration exempt from quantitative limits (new art. 31, paragraph 2, of Legislative Decree 81/2015). What is unclear, however, is the temporal perimeter within which this formula can be used; since the rule that explicitly allowed the use of stabilisation for more than 24 months has disappeared, interpreters will have to understand whether this duration limit is still surmountable or not.

The Threshold

The second major change concerns the possibility of exceeding the threshold of 30% of contract workers out of the total number of directly employed employees of the user company.

In this regard, the rules applicable to workers employed on fixed-term contracts are revised, specifying that all those relationships that are already exempted from the numerical threshold provided for ordinary fixed-term contracts do not fall under the legal threshold (30% of the workforce in force on 1 January of the year in which the contracts are concluded). Thus, relationships entered into in the start-up phase of new activities, those of innovative start-ups, seasonal relationships, those for specific performances, replacement contracts and those with workers over the age of 50 years are subtracted from the calculation of the 30% threshold. Also not included in the calculation, as already mentioned, are indefinite-term relationships involving missions with a fixed duration.

The causes

The third group of novelties concerns the obligation to indicate the reasons, provided for in Article 19(1) of Legislative Decree 81/2015 for all temporary relationships (whether direct or for the purpose of administration) lasting more than 12 months.

The employment supplement provides that the causal reason is not needed, even if the threshold is exceeded, when the contract is concluded with unemployed persons or persons who have been in receipt of social security benefits for a period of more than six months, or workers who can be defined as 'disadvantaged' or 'very disadvantaged' according to EU and national regulations.