(Finance) – “The lack of stabilization of religion teachers is costing the State dearly: after the record compensation decided on Christmas Eve by the Court of Turin, this time it is the labor judge of Perugia who condemns the school administration to pay a maxi sum, again due to the unmotivated repetition of substitutions, to be assigned to a teacher who has been substituting for about twenty years without ever even having the possibility of taking part in the competition. This last one is particularly lacking serious, since by law an insolvency procedure should be announced every three years”. This is what he says Anief in a note commenting on the sentence of the court of Perugia.
In the judgment – Anief says – it was explained that the damage caused is evident and that therefore the State will have to pay the teacher “the sum of 41,114.72 euros”, equal to 16 monthly salaries, “taking into account the twenty-two years of service of the teacher and the seriousness of the violations in addition to the greater amount between legal interest and monetary revaluation accrued on the lot from today’s date to the balance”. A truly considerable sum that the judge wanted to assign to the teacher both to align with European indications, starting from EU Directive 70/EC of 1999 up to Italy’s recent referral to the European Court of Justice for the excess of substitutes and lack of stabilization , and also to discourage future violations. But also to follow up on Legislative Decree 131/2024, with which it was intended to guarantee proportionate and dissuasive compensation: today, it is no coincidence, the monthly payments that can be assigned to the injured party as compensation have become 24.
According to the judge, the illegitimate reiteration of fixed-term contracts was evident: in fact, we read again in the sentence, she was hired “for twenty-two consecutive school years from the 1999/00 school year to the 2020/21 school year for the entire year from 1.9 to 31.8 in the absence of replacement or temporary needs without taking advantage of the opportunity to take part in the competitions for placement in the role that the school administration has not announced for twenty years from 2004 to 2024”. The competition, the judge of the Court of Perugia further underlines, should also have been implemented “to ensure the achievement of objectives of good performance of the administration”.
In the appeal, i Anief lawyers of the teacher they contested that this practice violated both the art. 36 of Legislative Decree 165/2001 and the European Directive 1999/70/EC, which requires Member States to prevent abuse in the use of successive fixed-term contracts. Furthermore, he highlighted that the last competition for the recruitment of religious teachers dates back to 2004, leaving it without the possibility of stabilization for almost two decades. The judges found that thecontractual abuse was aggravated by the ministerial failure to announce three-year competitions as required by law no. 186/2003, an obligation systematically disregarded until 2024. It should be added that the sentence fits into the context of the changes introduced by Legislative Decree 131/2024, which updated the compensation system for abuses of fixed-term contracts in the public sector. The new art. 36, paragraph 5, of Legislative Decree 165/2001 provides that the worker is entitled to an allowance between 4 and 24 months of the last salary useful for TFR purposes. The amount of compensation is determined by the judge based on the severity of the abuse, the number of contracts and the overall duration of the employment relationship.