Discrezionalità dei giudici e differenze territoriali nel licenziamento illegittimo: una prospettiva sociologica

[Autom. eng. transl.] Since 2008, after the financial crisis, Italy has undertaken several reforms to flexibilize the labor market, with the aim of increasing the level of employment and consequently adapting the welfare provisions (Picot and Tassinari, 2017). Flexibility and efficiency are the criteria that, in the same years, also guided the revision of the judicial geography, which reduced the number of courts, the number of detached sections and Justice of the Peace offices (Verzelloni, 2020). The reform of the dismissal legislation is placed in this context of transformation of the mechanisms for regulating the labor market and the judicial system, representing a structural alteration of the same (Giuliani and Madama, 2022). Law no. 92/2012 (the so-called Fornero reform) and the legislative decree (legislative decree from now on) n. 23/2015 (the so-called Jobs Act), by intervening in the provisions on dismissal, reduce the role of the judge in sentences of illegitimate dismissal. These changes occur in a context, such as the Italian one, characterized by profound territorial differences between local labor systems, which are also reflected in the decision-making processes adopted within each Court of Appeal (Verzelloni, 2012; Dallara and Lacchei, 2021). The aim of this chapter is to verify whether, following the reduction of the judge's discretion that began with the implementation of law n. 92/2012, the differences between geographical areas in terms of the outcome of proceedings for unfair dismissal have been reduced, starting from the analysis of an original dataset that contains the second-instance unfair dismissal sentences of all Italian Courts of Appeal, excluding the Courts of Appeal of Rome and L’Aquila, from 2010 to 2020, for a total of 8,275 sentences. The chapter is organized as follows: paragraph two describes the effects of the Reforms on unfair dismissal on the discretion of Italian judges, starting from the perspective of the street level bureaucracy. The third paragraph presents the research methodology and the techniques adopted for the analysis of dismissal sentences. The fourth paragraph illustrates and discusses the results and the chapter concludes with the identification of new research avenues.