172 employees will have to be taken back by the employer who had outsourced them as part of a business branch transfer. The company in question is Bnl, the bank that is part of the French group Bnp Paribas and which, in April 2022, had moved 250 computer scientists to the information technology company Capgemini. Of these, 172 filed suit and on 10 July the Rome labor court agreed with them, ordering the bank to restore the previous relationship.
They will go back to being Bnl employees in all respects, even if, almost certainly, they will be seconded to Capgemini at least until mid-December to finish the work they are doing. But that’s not all because another sentence is expected in the coming months, relating to a second sale of a business unit by Bnl: in this case, 400 workers, this time from the back office, have turned to the court , outsourced to AST, a company of the Accenture group.
“We hope there will be the same outcome on Ast, we are optimistic – comments the head of First Cisl of the Bnl group, Valerio Maurizio Fornasari – also because we believed that the most difficult cause was that relating to Capgemini”. The unions immediately opposed the operation, never signing the transfer agreement. “We’re talking about people who have been in the BNL for years and who suddenly found themselves in uncertainty. About the future, about protections. And that, in the absence of explanations, he decided to go his own way. We have asked several times to have some information about the project and the medium-long term strategy, but we have not been listened to; what we have understood is that there is a plan to reduce personnel” explains Fabio Armeni, coordinator of Fabi in Bnl, who adds bitterly: “When the unions and a large company like Bnl cannot reach an agreement and it must be a judge to settle the matter, is always a defeat. For everyone”.
According to the judge, explains the lawyer Riccardo Bolognesi who assisted all the appellants, it was not a question of a transfer of a business unit “as the object of the transfer was undetermined, the scope of the activities and the workers transferred, and there was no functional autonomy”. The Bnl case is “yet another confirmation”, continues Bolognesi, after Montepaschi and Intesa Sanpaolo had also tried the same path only to be rejected in court.
“Even the European court has repeatedly ruled on the matter, putting a barrier to the operations of fragmentation and expulsion of company sectors and services which are not “branches” at all but groups of workers, who are managed as if they were redundancies through collaboration of newly established companies which receive a contract for some services but which, within a few years, manage to halve the number of workers transferred”, adds the lawyer.
In a note, Bnl announced that it immediately took action to follow up on the sentence and to evaluate “a possible appeal to support its position”. The agreement with Capgemini, continues Bnl, has the aim of improving the quality of IT services, guaranteeing “effective and timely maintenance and technological development activities” and “the progressive replacement of older applications”. Now the dialogue with the unions is starting to establish the immediate future of the 156 workers and find “solutions that allow the maintenance of operational continuity at CFT/Capgemini”. A reference to the possibility that employees can continue to stay at Capgemini for at least a few more months. But with a Bnl contract and paycheck.