Severance pay, for 700,000 employees of the public health sector (and others) a right to severance pay increasingly 'blurred'

One of the cardinal principles of civil law is that which concerns the characteristics and nature of a claim, i.e. that it must be certain, liquid and collectable in order to be enforced. Numerous articles of the civil code and the code of civil procedure regulate the peculiarities of these three fundamental adjectives. Well, for a few million citizens, one of the most important rights of an employee does not fully meet these three characteristics. We are talking about the severance pay (Tfr) of civil servants, what is commonly called 'liquidation' in jargon.

For the more than 700,00 employees of the public health service, it is technically referred to as the service premium allowance (Ips) or Tfr for those hired after 2000. The first designation dates back almost sixty years and its semantic meaning is already misleading and deceptive. Like the term 'severance pay' for state employees, it makes one think more of a welfare handout than of a full subjective right. It is no coincidence that, before various reforms, its disbursement was the responsibility of the Inadel, where the letter 'A' in the acronym meant, precisely, 'assistance'.

Going back to what was said above, for civil servants the Tfr does not have these three fundamental characteristics at all. There is nothing to be said about certainty and liquidity, because the reference rules are linear and clear in defining the exact perimeter of entitlement. The third item has taken on an entirely different significance, because the collectability of severance pay has for years been subjected to all kinds of constraints and criticalities verging on psychodrama. The events are well known, but perhaps a quick summary may be useful to better understand the absurdity of the situation.

It all started in 2010, after years and years in which severance payments were made regularly. The 'infamous' Tremonti decree intervened with two devastating articles on the civil service, creating a EUR 25 billion financial manoeuvre, the effects of which are still evident. Article 9 of Decree-Law 78/2010 introduced dozens of regulations (as many as 36 paragraphs) that penalised remuneration - among them, it is sufficient to recall the three-year freeze on collective bargaining - but with Article 12, paragraphs 7 and following, it profoundly affected the timing of the payment of the various allowances provided for civil servants. Beyond the measure of 'containment of the dynamics of current expenditure in compliance with public finance objectives' - unidirectional and not at all cyclical - misunderstandings arose from the very heading of the provision because the 'Interventions on social security matters' included the payments that were - and still are - considered interventions of a social security nature in an erroneous way since they are deferred remuneration to all intents and purposes.

After a decade of supine condescension, following an incidental appeal in 2022 by a State Police executive, the Constitutional Court finally intervened to verify the legitimacy of such a marked and irrational deferment that was no longer of a conjunctural nature but had become structural. The Constitutional Court's ruling No. 130 of 23 June 2023 sanctioned the inadmissibility of the question, but stated in the last paragraph that 'However, this Court cannot refrain from considering that such discipline - moreover connected, by express provision of the censured rule itself, to the necessarily contingent needs of consolidation of public accounts - insofar as combined with the described deferment, ends up aggravating the vulnus highlighted above'. The Consulta's clear indication has, moreover, remained totally unheeded by the Government. On this issue, the order of the Regional Administrative Court of Marche No. 105 of 15.2.2025 referred the question to the Council again, which was followed by similar remissions by the Regional Administrative Courts of Lazio and Friuli-Venezia Giulia.