Insider View: Italy must abrogate the racist Gelmini Law

Insider View
|
11 December 2023
Insider View
11 December 2023
A student protest against the Gelmini law

 Under a recent conciliation agreement at Milan University, all foreign-language lecturers, or Lettori, have received salary arrears in full, and those still in service will see their pay brought up to the level of their Italian counterparts. Milan received 5.4 million euros from the State to fund the pay-out and will not now have to reach into its own coffers to cover future court cases; the lecturers, too, can feel satisfied with their reward for a struggle that lasted nearly 40 years.

 In short, the Milan accord can be regarded in the main as a win-win, a model for all universities still engaged in a legal fight against their Lettori. Which, however, raises a question -- why only Milan? Why not elsewhere – why have other Universities not taken up the funding made available by the state to solve this vexed issue once and for all?

 The background to these questions is the pressure from Europe. ALLSI, the trade union formed to defend the interests of Lettori, has waged a decades-long fight to secure that pressure, both from national governments whose citizens have been discriminated against, and above all from the European Commission, resulting in a third infringement proceeding against Italy over discrimination against Lettori.
 
 The threat of legal action – especially the possibility of heavy fines – led Italy to introduce the legislation that enabled the Milan accord.
 
 But the Italian State is unsurpassed in its ability to play the long game, and a key tactic in that game is to legislate to obfuscate. Even the various decrees in this round of legislation – which itself lasted six years, from December 2017 – were beset by problems of under-funding, ambiguous or legally incoherent wording and impracticable timeframes for implementation. Above all, in the bigger legal picture, Italy has consistently refused to do anything about one of the root causes of the whole Lettori saga, the so-called Gelmini Law of 2010. 
 
 That law offers an ‘authentic interpretation’ of the meaning of the term ab origine as referred to foreign lecturers, namely that their entitlement to career reconstruction in line with Italian colleagues should be calculated, not from beginning to end, as common justice and above all Community law would have it, but instead only to the year 1994, when they were forcibly recategorised as ‘CEL’s (literally Linguistic Experts and Collaborators).
 Only in Milan and in a few other universities has that legal fiction finally been redressed, at least in monetary terms; elsewhere, backed up by a Court of Cassation which has taken on the role of ‘ammazzasentenze,’ nullifying years of costly litigation by Lettori, the Gelmini Law has enabled Italian universities to discriminate with impunity.
 
 In the past months, we have seen those such as Basilicata, Bologna and Verona simply ignore the offer of State funding, rather than pay their non-Italian employees what they are owed.
 
 The Gelmini Law was a deliberate ploy to nullify a judgment of the European Court of Justice. More subtly than Hungary or Poland, but equally effectively, Italy defies the rule of European law.
 
 The current case before the Court of Justice of the EU must force Italy to abrogate the Gelmini Law and ensure genuine career reconstruction for all Lettori, or it will signal a failure of the European project.
 
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Italy

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