Will the re-employment contract defuse the layoff bomb?
The measures at work – primarily the re-employment contract – provided for by the Sostegni bis decree analyzed by Giuliano Cazzola
The ircocervo is an imaginary animal – partly goat and partly deer – used by Aristotle in De Interpretatione to indicate “things that do not exist”. In the vulgate this word is commonly used to indicate the combination of pieces of bodies of different origin and nature, which together form a being that exists only in mythology (the centaur, the minotaur, etc.). Obviously, the concept can also be adapted to political-juridical operations conceived by the fervent imagination of governments or legislators.
Andrea Orlando – according to the advances of the Sostegni bis decree – intends to circulate, within the labor market, a contract type ircocervo or, wanting to go back over time and pass from the animal to the human species, a Frankenstein type contract.
It is intended to be called a '' reemployment contract '' and is described in these terms by the agencies: a type of "subordinate permanent employment contract aimed at encouraging the insertion of unemployed workers into the labor market pursuant to of article 19 of the legislative decree 14 September 2015, n. 150 (one of the application decrees of the jobs act) in the phase of resumption of activities after the epidemiological emergency ".
The stipulation of the contract is linked to a training period, aimed at guaranteeing the adaptation of the professional skills of the worker himself to the new working context, lasting 6 months. During this period, the prohibition of dismissal for objective reasons remains in force.
We recall incidentally that paragraph 3 of the aforementioned article 19 establishes that "the state of unemployment is suspended in the event of a subordinate employment relationship lasting up to six months".
Private employers, with the exception of the agricultural sector and domestic work, who hire workers with the re-employment contract are granted, for a maximum period of six months, exemption from the payment of 100 per cent of the total social security contributions to them. payable up to a maximum amount of 6,000 euros per year, with the exclusion of premiums and contributions due to the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL).
Employers who, in the 6 months prior to hiring, have not carried out individual dismissals for justified objective reasons or collective redundancies, in the same production unit, can access the exemption. But this contribution relief will be returned if the worker is not hired at the end of the test (the term is a bit surreptitious).
The re-employment contract should be applied to all sectors (except agricultural and domestic work) and cover all new hires. No limits therefore linked to age, residence or gender. The contract can be stipulated starting from the entry into force of the decree until 31 October 2021 (the date is the same time estimated for the end of the redundancy block).
It is evident the overlapping, in the newly minted contract, of different contents taken and assembled together. In essence, it is an apprenticeship contract that can be defined at any age (this is already the case if the unemployed are hired as such) for a maximum duration of six months (here appears a “ hit and run '' of the contract Temporary). As in the apprenticeship contract (which triggers a permanent relationship) at the end of the envisaged period, the parties can freely decide to withdraw from the contract, provided that it is given notice.
On the contrary, if neither of the parties withdraws, the employment relationship will continue as an ordinary subordinate employment relationship for an indefinite period. In the new case there are two variants: the total contribution exemption paid by the employer and the obligation to return it in case of failure to continue the relationship at the end of the six months. We always believe that economic incentives, even if important, do not usually compensate for a regulatory disincentive such as permanent employment.
Recall that the superbonus introduced by the Renzi government in the 2015 budget law also achieved significant results, but at a high price, because the relief lasted for three years (and therefore was much more captivating than the 6 thousand euros now envisaged). Furthermore, the incentives always end up “ drugging '' the labor market, especially if they are aimed – as it seems to be in this case – aimed at the recovery of workers who leave the cig, but who have maintained a purely formal relationship in these 18 months with the company, due to the freeze on layoffs.
The risk is the same that served as a corollary to the ban on dismissal: freezing the existing situation on the assumption that it could be the same at the end of the crisis.
The re-employment contract is a kind of measure that attempts to keep those relationships alive even after the expiry of the block and to remove or evade the reckoning between the existence of an actual need for that worker in that position and the constraint legislation that kept him there for 15 months, regardless of the transformations that in the meantime were taking place in that work organization, following the effects induced by the health crisis and the closure measures. As for collective redundancies, the measures envisaged make use of the tools set up in recent years, with some extension or enlargement of the audiences concerned. But the problem is not there.
I find that – despite the attempt to articulate the processes with appropriate differentiations – the government is not yet able to defuse that barrel of TNT – precisely the redundancy block – on which the economy is sitting.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/il-contratto-di-rioccupazione-disinneschera-il-rischio-licenziamenti/ on Fri, 21 May 2021 17:15:57 +0000.