Yes to dismissal if the practice is a 40-minute stop at the bar with colleagues

The worker pays with discharge for the habit of stopping at the bar with colleagues to have a chat. A habit which, according to the judges, may constitute outright fraud if the stop in the style of 'four friends at the bar' goes on for more than 40 minutes, and thus beyond the time needed to have breakfast and to carry out 'physiological needs', and the absence is not recorded in the attendance sheets. The Cassazione, with sentence 27610, thus rejected the appeal of an ecological operator who also had the task of coordinating the work of colleagues. A 'top' role that he performed, however, very democratically. According to what had emerged from the investigator's report, the employee 'together with two colleagues, devoted himself preordainedly and as a practice as constant as it was illegitimate, to meetings inside shops during working hours. These encounters did not end with the tasting of various drinks or, where appropriate, the performance of physiological needs inside the establishments, but continued in pleasant conversations outside the shops where the complainant spent most of his unauthorised breaks'. In the judges' sights, the time spent in chatting ended up above all 'nor can it be said,' reads the judgement, 'that these breaks lasted as long as it took to refresh oneself, since the meetings lasted, by way of example, 36 minutes (21.10.16), 38 minutes (10.11.16), 42 minutes (22.11.16) and most of the time was spent in the conversation following the consumption of breakfast. In the opinion of the employer, to whom the Court of Cassation agrees, these were 'repeated breaches of official duties were all the more serious in one who held a senior position'.

The ermines also emphasised the responsibility and coordination of other employees 'in the context of a service of particular importance such as waste collection'. And on the damage to the company's image, "the constant standing in public places for unreasonable lengths of time tasting drinks and chatting with colleagues, with the inevitable perception by the citizen of such deplorable praxis, would end up causing damage to the company's decorum and to the image created of it in the citizenship".

The Territorial Court therefore considered the dismissal to be 'proportionate' with respect to a conduct that assumed 'criminal relevance and, in particular, the crime of fraud', in that 'the failure to perform the work in the terms in which it was due, due to the fact that the employee had enjoyed repeated breaks decided unilaterally and arbitrarily, followed by untrue attestations on the duty sheets of full compliance with the agreed schedule, resulted in the unfair receipt of a partially non-due remuneration with correlative damage to the company'. The territorial court then specified that 'in any event, even leaving aside the possibility of the crime of fraud, the overall conduct as described above, insofar as it is capable of deceiving the employer who relies on the correct performance of the service, constitutes an act that, also because of its systematic nature, is capable of severing the bond of trust'.