Fragile workers can have protection within the limits of 180 days in the calendar year and industrial employees are always excluded from the protection of the disease due to absence from quarantine. Waiting to know the concrete intentions of the Government to restore the protection of the disease to workers absent for quarantine and to fragile workers who cannot make the service in smart working, these two restrictive interpretations adopted by INPS during the emergency period pose further application problems that go beyond the lack of financial coverage of the rules.
The general rule is that sickness allowance is normally paid by INPS for a maximum of 180 days in each calendar year and with the exclusion of certain categories of workers such as industrial employees, middle managers and managers. Article 26 of Legislative Decree 18/2020 established, on the other hand, that the period spent in quarantine “by employees of the private sector, is equated to illness for the purposes of the remuneration provided for by the reference legislation and is not computable for the purposes of the period of behavior “. Therefore, the law did not extend the ordinary rules of the disease to quarantine cases, but established a new protection by equating it only in economic terms to sickness benefit.
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Similarly, the ordinary provisions establish that the protection of INPS is recognized in any case within the limit of 180 days in the calendar year. Article 26, on the other hand, established from time to time the protection period to be referred to within the limits of the financial coverage. The technical report of decree 18 also seems to go in this direction by establishing that the new protections are “in derogation from the provisions in force”. Moreover, in quantifying the expenditure, the legislator makes a calculation that does not take into account the contractual qualifications but is connected to the number of infections and to the potential contacts each of them had.
Faced with this regulatory framework which appears sufficiently clear, INPS has adopted a very restrictive interpretation with the message 2584/2020, then with the messages 4157/2020 and 171/2021. In essence, INPS states that “Nothing has been innovated … with regard to social security protection, including the temporal limits set by the legislator for the various categories of workers (permanent, fixed-term, fixed-term agricultural workers , entertainment workers, seafarers, etc.) “. In other words, according to the INPS, all the limits of the ordinary rules also apply to the emergency protections provided for the quarantine and for fragile workers and this despite the two provisions act precisely in derogation from the current legislation.
