A ruling by the Court of Naples strengthens the protections of workers employed in private healthcare contracts. The Labor Judge declared the dismissal of a healthcare worker with over twenty years of service unlawful, ordering her immediate reinstatement at the Serapide Physiokinesitherapy Center.
The case concerns Nadia Deynat, hired in 2000 as a healthcare assistant and fired in October 2024 after the company lost the contract to manage the Toiano nursing home in Pozzuoli, a facility affiliated with the Naples 2 North Local Health Authority. Although the worker was subsequently rehired by the incoming cooperative, Innotec, thanks to the social clause included in the collective bargaining agreement, the employee decided to challenge her original dismissal.
The appeal, supported by the FP CGIL Metropolitan Area of Naples and represented by Raffaele Ferrara of the CGIL Naples legal department, was granted in full by the Court. With ruling number 10776/2025 RG, published on March 12, 2026, labor judge Martina Brizzi reaffirmed a well-established legal principle: the termination of a contract does not automatically constitute a justified objective reason for dismissal.
According to the Court, the employer is required to demonstrate that it has attempted every possible solution to relocate the employee within its organization before proceeding with the dismissal. In the case under review, the Serapide Center failed to provide concrete evidence that it was impossible to employ the employee in other structures or active contracts managed by the company, either in equivalent positions or, possibly, in inferior positions.
For this reason, the dismissal was deemed to lack any real objective justification. The judge therefore ordered the employee's immediate reinstatement to her position at the Serapide Center, in addition to the payment of compensatory compensation calculated on her last actual overall salary, up to a maximum of twelve months' salary, and the payment of social security and welfare contributions accrued from the time of dismissal until her effective reinstatement.
The FP CGIL union expressed satisfaction. "This is the third favorable ruling in the same collective dismissal procedure and confirms a key principle: worker protections do not end with the takeover of the new company thanks to the social clause," stated Marco D'Acunto, FP CGIL regional secretary responsible for private healthcare. "The outgoing company retains the obligation to explore all possible internal solutions before proceeding with the employee's permanent dismissal, regardless of the guarantees offered by the incoming company."
D'Acunto also thanked the worker for her determination in pursuing the cause. "We thank Nadia Deynat for the tenacity she has shown over these months and for believing in the union's arguments from the very beginning."
The Court's decision is part of an increasingly clear-cut case law that in recent years has strengthened the burden of proof on employers in dismissal cases related to the loss of contracts, especially in the sensitive private healthcare sector.
It seems to me to be a decision that reaffirms the employer's obligations but the practical phase remains ambiguous: it is not always clear how the internal checks should be carried out, and then the times and compensations are not always correctly explained in the documents, so doubts remain.
The ruling appears to be fair, but there are doubts about how the procedure was conducted: the employer failed to demonstrate that he attempted to relocate the worker, and therefore it appears that concrete evidence was lacking. The social clause is complex and often leaves room for different interpretations.