An employer who employs more than fifteen employees, including executives, and who, as a result of a reduction or transformation of work, intends to notify - within one hundred and twenty days - at least five dismissals (or one dismissal if the company has used the special salary support scheme, so called “CIGS”) in the business unit or in several business units in the same province is required to follow a procedure of information and consultation with the work councils or, if there are no work councils, with the trade union associations belonging to the most representative confederations at national level (Articles 4 and 24 of Law 23 July 1991 No. 223).

The redundancy procedure is therefore composed of a first trade union phase, the maximum duration of which is 45 days, and a (potential) subsequent administrative phase, the duration of which is, at most, 30 days (unless the number of redundancies declared by the employer is less than ten, in which case the terms above indicated are halved).

Only at the end of the procedure the employer will be able to adopt the dismissals against the redundant employees who are identified applying the criteria agreed with the trade union representatives or, in the absence of agreement, of the following legal criteria in agreement with each other (Article 5 of Law 23 July 1991 No. 223):

1. f...