In corso di pubblicazione nel “Il lavoro nelle pubbliche amministrazioni”.
Il testo riproduce con qualche interpolazione e l’aggiunta delle note l’intervento (qui nella versione estesa) pronunciato a Bologna nell’occasione dei Seminari di Bertinoro il 12 dicembre 2016 e che non tiene quindi conto dei contenuti dei successivi decreti sul pubblico impiego approvati dal Consiglio dei Ministri il 19 maggio 2017 in attuazione dell’art. 17 della legge 7 agosto 2015, n. 124.

The Italian Constitutional Court judgment No. 251 of 2016, declared the unconstitutionality of various provisions concerning the law No. 124 of 2015 (including those contained in Article 11 delegating the Government to amend the Legislative Decree No. 165 of 2001 provisions concerning the public managers).
In particular, the Constitutional Court highlighted the breach of the loyal cooperation principle, whereas it was envisaged that the legislative decrees were adopted as a consequence of the attainment of a relevant opinion, rather than as a consequence of an agreement reached within the context of the Italian State-Regions Conference.
Even if the judgment considered in principle the enabling act only, indirectly it had an impact also on the executive decree on public managers’, which was, as a consequence, withdrawn by the Government before the promulgation. Thus, even before the entry into force, another public managers’ reform has failed.
The paper, reproducing the speech delivered at the Bertinoro Conference in December 2016, after having briefly analyzed the limited provisions in number concerning the trade union relations outlined in the new legislative decree proposal, examines the issues that the Constitutional Court's judgment leaved open.
After that, the paper analyzes the trade union system as defined by the current provisions, which has been largely ineffective for some ‘congenital defects’ as well as for some financial reasons.
In the final section the paper examines the issue of precariousness of public managers that, without a mechanism linking in an strong way the manager assignments’ to the performance assessment, always risks evolving into a system intended to guarantee the loyalty to the appointer, in contrast with the univocal evolution of the Italian constitutional jurisprudence, that actually have constitutionalized the principle of functional distinction between the political direction activities and the administrative management.