You could quote an old television commercial that says, “People like to win easily.” This is somewhat similar to what the state tried with civil servants who submitted numerous requests for recognition of salary increases for the years 1990 to 1993. The justices interpreted the rules by agreeing with the officials who appealed. Then came a law that “repealed” the convictions. The matter thus reached the Constitutional Court, which instead ruled that laws cannot be enacted, including retroactively, to resolve a dispute in which the administration is a party to the proceedings. A principle that we could say of legal civilization. But what topic is the sentence about? To understand what we are talking about, we have to go back more than 30 years, to 1989, when a union agreement in the public sector decided on “seniority increases” for public employees: 300,000 of the old lire for the first, second and third qualifications of the functional area ; 400,000 lira for the fourth, fifth and sixth qualifications and 500,000 lira for the seventh, eighth and ninth functional qualifications.
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These increases were due to those who had acquired five years of professional experience by January 1, 1990. If it was ten or twenty years, the amounts continued to increase. The union agreement was implemented in a presidential decree, a decree of the President of the Republic, No. 44 of 1990. Then, as so often happens, came another provision, Legislative Decree 384 of 1992, extending for a period of three years from 1991 to 1993 all the contents of the old presidential decree. Including seniority increases? Yes, say many workers who have begun flooding the TAR with appeals for wage increases. No, according to the public administrations, who instead assumed that the requirement of 5 years of professional experience (or 10 and 20) should still be met by 1990. However, the judges had been in agreement with the officials for a long time. In short, the direction was almost uniform: the expansion of the 1990 presidential decree also applied to seniority increases for civil servants. So what has the government done?
With a budget maneuver, he changed the cards on the table and tipped the scales in his favor. With Law 388 of 2000, he gave his own “interpretation” of the extension of the presidential decree, essentially saying that everything was extended except the seniority increase rule for civil servants. A reading that was, however, completely overturned by the ruling of the Constitutional Court by Judge Marco D'Alberti. “The judgment,” says a press release from the Court, “first makes it clear that the review of the constitutionality of retroactive laws becomes even stricter when the legislative intervention has an impact on judgments that are still ongoing, especially in cases where a person is affected .” public administration involved in the procedure, whereby the legislature is prevented from legally resolving certain disputes and thus establishing an imbalance between the positions of the parties involved in the procedure. In addition, the explanatory memorandum clarified that “only compelling reasons of public interest allow legislative intervention in ongoing proceedings” and that “the principles of the rule of law and due process require that these reasons be treated with the greatest possible care” .
THE DEVICE
In the present case, there were no compelling public interest reasons justifying the law. The judgment states that the possibility for employees to accumulate the length of service necessary for the increase even in the new period (1991-1993) fully corresponds to the reasons of equality and fairness of the remuneration system. “If anything,” the judgment says, “it was the contested provision that gave rise to unjustified pay differentiation to the detriment of those public servants who, unlike in the three-year period 1988-1990, were unable to pay the remuneration.” Most of her service took place in the following three-year period from 1991 to 1993. What will happen now? The unions are reviewing the rule to determine whether these increases can also be awarded to those who have not yet filed an appeal. And there could be tens of thousands of people.
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on Il Messaggero