Will the judges blow up the Ita-Lufthansa deal?
Ita Airways will have to hire 77 former Alitalia employees. This was decided by the judge of the fourth section of the Rome Labor Court. Facts, reactions and the commentary of the transport expert economist, Andrea Giuricin.
“The decision of the Rome Labor Court is quite surprising as the decision to restart ITA Airways in discontinuity with the old Alitalia is a decision also agreed with the European Commission”. This is what the transport expert economist Andrea Giuricin comments with Start Magazine .
But let's see facts, reactions, comments and scenarios.
WHAT THE LABOR JUDGE HAS DECIDED ON FORMER ALITALIA EMPLOYEES
Ita Airways will have to hire 77 former Alitalia employees. This was decided by the judge of the fourth section of the Rome Labor Court, Claudio Cottatellucci , who "ascertained the existence of the transfer of the company branch" between the old and the new national airline. This is an important pronouncement, to which another 1100 former Alitalia employees who had appealed can appeal. The ITA-Lufthansa marriage is at risk.
THE COMMENT ON THE JUDGMENT FOR ALITALIA EMPLOYEES
Sentence 6205/2023 of 14 June 2023 – underlines Avionews – "subverts the previous negative orientation of the Court of Rome itself which, with sentence 8428/2022 of 23 October 2022 had ruled out that the operation concerned a business unit pre-existing and functionally autonomous. In the 2022 ruling, judge Laura Cerroni had therefore rejected the appeals presented by over 100 former Alitalia employees".
THE SATISFACTION OF THE BASE TRADE UNIONS
The Unione Sindacale di Base (Usb) is satisfied and defines the sentence as "a first step against injustice and the non-application of Italian laws". For trade unionists "there must be a severe assessment of the work of the actors who casually destroyed a company and put thousands of families in enormous difficulty", underlines Usb. "Moreover trampling on the laws of the Italian Republic, with the stubborn secrecy imposed on the contract that sanctioned the transformation of Alitalia into Ita, an open secret, unhinged today for the first time by the labor judge of the Court of Rome", he concludes.
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE REPUBLIC
During the negotiations between Lufthansa and the Meloni government, the Germans extracted precise guarantees from our Ministry of the Economy on this point. "If Ita has regulated itself in this way, it is because the European Union has imposed it not to take charge – automatically – of the former employees of Alitalia and Cityliner – remarked Repubblica – In other words, it would be the Italy, at least up to a certain point”.
THE WORDS OF TURICCHI
It is also true that the president of ITA, Antonino Turicchi, in an interview in May with Corriere della Sera , spoke of a right of withdrawal for Lufthansa in the event the sentences of the labor judges establish continuity between Alitalia and ITA. In other words, Lufthansa has reserved itself out of the game, added Repubblica .
THE COMMENT OF THE ECONOMIST GIURICIN
“The decision of the Labor Court of Rome is quite surprising as the decision to restart ITA Airways in discontinuity with respect to the old Alitalia is a decision also agreed with the European Commission – comments the expert transport economist Andrea Giuricin with Start Magazine – Precisely this point, the discontinuity, was crucial to make the restart of the vector possible. Without discontinuity, there would have been no Ita Airways”.
According to Giuricin, CEO of the company Tra Consulting, "the reinstatement of 77 employees does not cause so much problems for the company which is in any case in a growth phase and plans to hire new personnel, but it is clear that uncertainty increases and risks causing question marks for the Lufthansa buyer. Among other things, according to the European Commission, the personnel should be hired according to market criteria and this ruling instead goes in the opposite direction".
Giuricin concludes: “The key point of all this is therefore the uncertainty that is created, which is not good for Ita and for the sales process”.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/alitalia-ita-lufthansa/ on Fri, 16 Jun 2023 09:57:29 +0000.