Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation has ruled that the dismissal of an employee for insulting their manager in front of a colleague is legitimate. The court affirmed this in a verdict concerning a woman from Acireale who was fired for just cause after using offensive language against a superior.
As reported by the daily newspaper ‘Il Messaggero,’ the supreme court upheld the conclusions of the Court of Appeal of Catania, which had qualified the employee’s conduct as being of “considerable gravity.” The employee had addressed her superior using “a vulgar slur within the context of objecting to an instruction,” an expression the judges deemed indicative of “insubordination.” The fact this occurred in the presence of a colleague demonstrated “an attitude of challenge and contempt towards authority,” the justices wrote in the ruling filed on July 25.
The case dates back to 2018. In its 2023 sentence, the Court of Appeal of Catania “assessed the intrinsic gravity of the slur not as a ‘clash or argument'” but as a genuine act of insubordination, “especially considering the context in which it was uttered, namely in the presence of another employee, which accentuates its seriousness and public nature.”