Italian Lecturers Cross the Rubicon in Their Fight for Equal Pay and Long-term Employment Contracts

by Henry Rodgers

“The European Commission asks that the Court of Justice impose on the Italian Republic a penalty
payment of EUR 309,750 for each day’s delay in complying with the judgement of the Court in Case C-212/99, from the day on which the Court delivers its judgement in the present case.”

Thus concludes the notice published in the Official Journal of the European Communities in April this year of the Commission’s recourse to its last resort to compel Italy to end its 17 year long discriminatory treatment of foreign language university lecturers (lettori). With the Commission prosecution, Italy now risks the ignominy of being the first ever member state to be fined for discrimination in the history of the European Union (EU). All other remedies for redress have been exhausted in a marathon legal battle which has pitted the lettori against a remarkably intransigent state.

In common with my lettori colleagues I could never have envisaged when moving from Ireland to work in Italy that I would become involved in such a protracted and high-profile battle for parity of treatment. The case of the crucial figure in that campaign, our Spanish colleague Pilar Allué, was first referred to the Court of Justice by the Pretura di Venezia back in 1987. Her subsequent victory in 1989, and a further victory in 1993, are routinely cited in contemporary textbooks of EU law. It was because of inadequate implementation of the Allué case law that the Commission opened the infringement proceedings against Italy, which resulted in a third victory in 2001 in Case C-212/99- the non-enforced judgement for which it has requested the daily fine referred to in the Official Journal.

On the political front, the European Parliament has passed four resolutions condemning the discrimination against us. More recently, my Dublin European parliamentarian, Proinsias De Rossa, as Vice-Chairman of the parliament’s powerful Petitions Committee, co-signed my petition on the Italy’s continuing defiance of the pinnacle institutions of the union.

Pilar Allué’s cases contested a 1980 law under which lettori —unlike our Italian colleagues–were employed on temporary contracts. These contracts gave rise to widespread insecurity and abuses. Despite a decade of high inflation and regular increases for our Italian colleagues, lettori salaries in the early 1990s at “La Sapienza” University of Rome, where I work, had remained practically unchanged since 1980. Notorious too was the absence of maternity leave, with families in many cases being planned around the academic calendar. In the archive of our lettori e-group, there are moving messages of mothers across Italy teaching into the eight month of their pregnancies, then resuming work immediately after the semester break, often paying their students to babysit their newborn in the staffroom.

To give effect to the Allué case law in its legal order, Italy had merely to convert the temporary lettori contracts into open-ended ones. While a new law passed in 1995 did provide for open-ended contracts, it simultaneously demoted lettori to the category of technical and administrative staff, and created a new employment relationship which in practice robbed us of our acquired rights under the Allué judgement. Effectively what was conceded on tenure was cancelled out financially by the reduced job status.

As Guardian of the Treaties of European Union, the Commission is empowered to take infringement proceedings against member states in breach of EU law. Italy tops the EU table in the comparative statistics of these proceedings. Dissatisfied with the application of the 1995 law, the Commission opened infringement proceedings for discrimination against lettori during the Irish Presidency of the EU in December 1996.

I was a relative novice as a campaigner when I flew from Rome to Dublin earlier that year to address the European Affairs Committee of the Irish parliament, and to enlist my government’s support for the opening of infringement proceedings against Italy. Waiting for my turn in the order of business in the ante-room to the parliament chamber, I could see the Committee in session on closed circuit TV. As I prepared to make the case for the opening of infringement proceedings before politicians I had previously only seen on prime time TV, it occurred to me how far-fetched such an outcome would have seemed when I left Ireland with the naive belief that the right to parity of treatment was relatively automatic.

With the opening of the infringement proceedings, my own involvement increased greatly. My university “La Sapienza” was one of 9 universities chosen by the Commission to prove its case. Over the long course of the proceedings, which resulted in the Court of Justice ruling against Italy in 2001, it was necessary to supply the Commission with documentation and updates to show the infringement persisted. Unfortunately, three of the nine universities had been dropped from the proceedings on the basis of paltry settlements they made for their acquired rights. Italy now pushed hard for the adoption of similar settlements in the remaining universities with the aim of proving they had complied with the Court judgement. Messages in our e-group archive evidence the widespread alarm and desperation among lettori at this time.

A peculiarity of the infringement proceedings is that, while the proceedings were taken on behalf of the lettori, we were not technically party to them and could not have access to documentation exchanged between the Commission and Italy. To keep the Commission accountable and vigilant in the face of the solutions being pushed by Italy, I began, on the advice of a expert on EU law, to write in the letters page of the authoritative Economist-owned European Voice on the need for consistency between the rulings of the local Italian courts and the settlement of the infringement proceedings. The paper’s influential readership of Euro parliamentarians, bureaucrats, policy makers and practitioners of EU law had shown a strong interest in the just conduct of the proceedings.

A parallel avenue for redress for discrimination is to take a case before the local courts. Judges throughout Italy have consistently awarded lettori the economic treatment of researcher or associate professor. Taking the matter up in the European Voice, my lawyer Proinsias De Rossa made the pertinent point that the Italian state was at odds with its very own judiciary in its treatment of lettori and argued that the findings of the local courts had to have weight with the Commission.

In an article commissioned by the Gazette of the Law Society of Ireland on our litigation for parity of treatment, I wrote that I believed our e-group archive of messages would in time be seen as an important social document showing how a category of non-national workers responded to discrimination and gradually educated themselves in EU law. Set up as open forum for the exchange of information and experience, our e-group links colleagues all over Italy. The messages also serve as a barometer of the spirits and morale over time of a category whose resilience has certainly been put to the test. That resilience was encouraged in October 2003 when a Commission delegation came to Rome to deliver an ultimatum to the Italian government on compliance. I was happy to post news to the group of a meeting with that delegation, from which my colleagues and I came away with the feeling that our battle for justice had entered its endgame phase.

In response to the Commission ultimatum, Italy introduced a draft law in January 2004 establishing the grade of part-time researcher-the lowest teaching grade in the university career structure—as the benchmark for our salaries. This was rejected by the Commission, which referred the case to the Court of Justice and recommended a daily fine of EUR 309,750. Italy now brazenly worsened the draft law, explicitly setting our pay at half the hourly rate of that of part-time researcher. This amended version was signed into law by Italian president Azelio Ciampi.

One wonders if President Ciampi was aware of the implications of his action for his long-term reputation. An elder statesman and widely perceived as the contemporary Italian politician who has done most to integrate his country into Europe, Ciampi has had the sort of political career which would entitle him to a prominent place in the European history of these times. Should Italy, however, become the first member state of the EU to be fined for discrimination, then the lettori law he signed will most certainly damage his political reputation.