ITA 
Court of Cassation, Labour Section, Order No. 30449 of 17 October 2022.
The Court of Cassation returns to comment on the notion of place of business dependence pursuant to Article 413 of the Code of Civil Procedure for the purposes of determining the territorial jurisdiction of the labour court.
And so the Court of Cassation recalls how the jurisprudence of legitimacy has enucleated a particularly broad notion of the concept of company dependence and held that it not only does not coincide with the concept of production unit contained in other provisions of law, but must be understood in a broad sense, in harmony with the mens legis, aimed at favouring the rooting of the special labour court in the place close to the work performance (Court of Cassation no. 23110 of 2010; Court of Cassation no. 3154 of 2018; Court of Cassation no. 23053 of 2020; Court of Cassation no. 1285 of 2022).
The rationale of Article 413 of the Code of Civil Procedure is in fact "to make the proceedings more functional and speedy, by rooting them in the places normally closest to the employee's residence, where the evidence necessary for the proceedings is more easily available" (most recently, see Court of Cassation no. 12907 of 2022, which identified the relevant dependency for the purposes of the territorial jurisdiction in question as the home of a journalist)".
And so, in relation to the case under consideration, the Court of Cassation reiterates that the notion of "dependency to which the employee is attached", as referred to in Article 413 of the Code of Civil Procedure, also includes the car park owned by third parties, where the goods instrumental to the work performance (such as the loading of goods, transport and subsequent return for the storage of vans) are located, where the tasks performed by the employee begin and end".
It is also irrelevant, continues the Supreme Court, the legal title on the basis of which the employer has used a possible third-party area, since a company dependency also means the place in which the employer has located a nucleus, albeit minimal and modest, of goods organised for the exercise of the business, such as "the means for carrying out transport", intended for the fulfilment of business purposes (Cass. no. 4362 of 2022; Cass. no. 1285 of 2022). It is sufficient that even a single employee operates in such a nucleus and it is not necessary that the relevant premises or equipment are company property, as they may well be owned by the employee himself or by third parties (see Cass. no. 3154 of 2018, which recalls Cass. no. 4767 of 2017 and Cass. no. 17347 of 2013; see also Cass. no. 13309 of 2019 and Cass. no. 23053 of 2020)".