The Municipality of Sassari has been convicted of having stipulated fixed-term contracts without valid reasons and will have to compensate 22 workers, hired between the 1980s and 2011 with fixed-term contracts for various projects financed by the Region.
The rulings of the Court of Appeal of Sassari, issued in 2023 and '24, were confirmed by the Court of Cassation, which rejected the appeals of the Municipality: the judges established that the contracts were illegitimate and now the Municipality will have to pay up to 12 months of compensation for a total of approximately 654 thousand euros, including legal costs. The requests to transform the contracts into permanent ones were rejected.
According to the judges, the use of fixed-term contracts was to be considered illegitimate, "since it was not justified by the indication of temporary technical, organizational, productive and/or substitutive reasons", given that such contracts, " in addition to being lacking in formal justification, had as their object work activities pertaining to stable and continuous functions of the local authority, which is why they had to be considered lacking in temporary and exceptional justifications also from a substantive perspective".
Illegitimacy both under national and European law. The workers include people who have worked for years on intermittent contracts, such as gardeners, drivers and other roles, often for many years. The judges recognized that the contracts lacked temporary motivations and that the functions performed were stable and continuous, thus making the use of fixed-term contracts illegitimate, both under Italian and European law.
