The Italian Labyrinth of Adjudicating Employment Rights: in Search of ‘Ariadne’s Thread’

This paper belongs to a comparative research network coordinated by Professors Susan Corby and Pete Burgess and it deals with the process of adjudicating substantive employment rights in Italy. In particular, the study is developed along three levels of investigation: first, the industrial relations background; next, the court system, from its beginnings to the present day; and finally, the extra-judicial system, e.g. conciliation and arbitration. In so doing, the author takes into account the complex framework of legislation, and the main important official data on Italian procedures, in order to reconstruct it and then evaluate the effectiveness of each system. Despite the long-standing problems (delay, complexity, cultural resistance to alternative dispute resolution, ecc.) that historically characterize Italian employment rights adjudication, even the recent provisions do not seem to fill the gaps in the system in order to make it more effective and efficient. After illustrating the judicial and extra-judicial processes, and the position of administrative and trade union bodies, and the different procedures available to a single worker, the paper makes some concluding observations with the aim of stimulating a debate on the possibility of involving more trade unions in the process of adjudicating employment rights.