ITA 
Court of cassation 26198/2022
The use of a day of union leave to engage in personal activities unrelated to the function for which the leave was granted constitutes a disciplinary breach punishable by dismissal.
On this point, it does not matter that, for the unjustified absence of a day or abandonment of the workstation, the collective agreement provides for a mere conservative sanction. For the Supreme Court and the judges on the merits, in fact, the undue use of union leave has disciplinary relevance also and above all because it integrates the extremes of abuse of rights and cannot be examined in the more reduced perspective of only days of unjustified absence.
The leave, as the Supreme Court recalls, had been used for purposes unrelated to the provision of Article 30 St. Lav. which recognizes the members of the governing bodies, provincial and national, of the associations referred to in Article 19, the right to paid leave, according to the rules of labor contracts, for participation in the meetings of the aforementioned bodies. And so, the Supreme Court continues, the qualification of the employee's conduct in terms of abuse of rights appears consistent with the finding of the concrete case. Coming into the picture is not the mere absence from work, but a behavior of the employee characterized by a quid pluris represented by the use of union leave for purposes other than institutional ones.
The foregoing, the Supreme Court concludes, excludes the traceability of the conduct to the collective norms that punish with conservative sanction the absence from work, failure to show up or unjustified abandonment of the workplace. The Supreme Court, therefore, rejects the appeal brought by the employee, upholding the decisions of the judges of merit and thus the legitimacy of the dismissal for just cause imposed on the employee.
