The history of the legal labour proceeding in Italy. Critical comments

download PDF


Contents: 1. The reasons for the labour dispute process. 2. Labour proceeding law in its historical-political context. 3. New rules for labour justice. 4. The crisis and new trends. 5. Is the end of the speciality of labour proceeding?

  1. 1. The reasons for the process of the labour disputes

It is assumed there must be a ‘labour proceeding’; however, until the 1973 legal reformation (L. No. 533/1973), labour disputes concerning subordinate employment relationships lived within the same circuit of ordinary civil litigation. The diversification stems from a meditation on the interests at stake in the field of labour and from the development of a complex system, deriving from heteronomous sources of different origins and effectiveness, so much to require a specialized preparation of judges and lawyers. In this way, a non-arbitrary link could be established between the founding moments of the labour law field and the new procedural system, detached from the civil matrix. Mainly, the theoretical development of labour law due to the theorization of the “trade union system”, which reflected a natural evolution as an ordered set of norms with its own rules of production and self-determined internal relations, indeed represented one of the underlying reasons for considering the legal relationships, concerning the “fact-job”, as deserving of a distinction concerning the contractual relations of ordinary civil law.