Work

Changing rules and jurisprudence fuel conflicts

From increasing protection to the statute of limitations for claims, changes of course and uncertainties fuel litigation

by Giampiero Falasca

16 September 2025

2' min read

Key points

Licenses
Fraudulent regulations

2' min read

Labour disputes are a phenomenon that does not depend solely on the good or bad quality of the relationships between companies and workers; certainly a deterioration in these relations can increase conflicts, just as an improvement in relations can reduce the propensity to initiate lawsuits, but it would be naive to limit the analysis of the phenomenon to this consideration.

When litigation grows - as is happening in our country, where the number of disputes, which fell drastically during the pandemic, has gradually returned to the volumes before the Covid emergency - one must try to understand what phenomena are influencing this increase.

It is true that the explosion of disputes relating to public employment relations, especially those in the schooling sector, has a decisive weight on the overall numbers. But there is also another structural element that keeps the volume of litigation high, not new in our legal system, but powerfully back in the limelight: the new season of legal uncertainty that has invested labour law.

From the Constitutional Court to the Court of Cassation, from appeal to first instance, the rulings of recent years have called into question the rules inspired by objective criteria, in favour of a return to the centrality of the discretionary assessment of jurisprudence: a criterion that, by definition, removes certainty, widens interpretative solutions and encourages conflict.

Licenziamenti

A significant example is represented by the Constitutional Court's rulings on layoffs. First the intervention on the regime of increasing protections, then the declaration of unconstitutionality of the rigid mechanisms for quantifying the compensation, to end with the recent ruling on small businesses: interventions united by the desire to refer to the judge a broader evaluation compared to the indications of the Jobs Act, with inevitable fluctuations from court to court, which become an incentive to sue.

The Supreme Court has followed a line consistent with this approach of the Consulta. Suffice it to think of the change of course on the prescription of work credits, which has modified decades-old guidelines and opened up entirely new scenarios for the commencement of time limits. And the courts of merit are also the protagonists of many interpretative conflicts.

Fraudulent regulations

This situation, which runs through the entire system, is not only the result of the choices of jurisprudence, quite the contrary. The judiciary often has to remedy the failures generated by the poor quality of legislation: obscure, stratified and often ambiguously written rules. Italian labour law has suffered for years from an excess of regulatory production, which results in fragmented and mutable texts. Each intervention, instead of clarifying, seems to open up new spaces of interpretative conflict.

It is in this context that the volume of litigation must be read. If the rule is unclear, if case law fluctuates, if the law is written in a way that allows conflicting readings, litigation becomes a rational choice.

The challenge for legislators and jurisprudence should be to reconstruct certainties; otherwise, litigation will continue to be high.