Autonomia e subordinazione nel d. lgs. 81/2015

The essay deals with the new legal order in Italian Labour Law, where since 2016 rights and duties provided for in employment relationships must also be referred to self-employed workers who perform services under the so-called organizational power of an entrepreneur, in accordance with Art. 2, decree 81-2015. This concerns just people who work under the following three conditions: they work for a certain period of time, only on a personal basis and in a manner “organized” by the entrepreneur in regard to time and place.\r\nAs the common contractual framework is the employment relationship as subordinated-worker (in accordance with Art. 1, decree 81-2015), the conditions to justify this extension in workers’ protection rely on the factual situation of persons who work in a context in which they don’t have any responsibility, which is the same for employees and “organized” workers, though the distinction between them still depends on the fact that employees are not engaged to realize a specific object agreed in the contract.\r\nFollowing the decision of the Italian Constitutional Court n. 30/1996, subordination requires that persons work for an external organization, without any legal involvement in governance, and now similarly autonomous “organized” workers must be protected like employees because of their similar external position to businesses. For them legal terms “by only personal work” must be defined by reference to a contractual framework where organizational matters are linked to the power of the entrepreneur over all the aspects of the persons work, including time and place.\r\nBy contrast, autonomous workers are not protected where a person performs a service under the direction of an entrepreneur even for a certain period of time but personally organizing his/her own performance, which is the meaning of legal terms “(not only) personal work”. In the end, an equal treatment is accorded to employees and free workers, irrespective of the legal distinction between subordination/non-subordination, when they share a common external condition towards businesses.