Mobbing. This is the key word contained in the first instance sentence with which the labor judge Laura Serra condemned the regional school office, in its Savona branch, in the case brought by Marcella Formisano, teacher of the Provincial Center for the Education of Adults from Savona.
The compensation, established on an equitable basis by the judge in addition eighteen thousand eurosto which compensatory and legal interests must be added, as well as litigation and technical consultancy costs.
According to the judge, in April 2020 Formisano would have received a completely unmotivated censure from Domenico Buscagliathen responsible for CPIA local and currently head teacher of the “Chiabrera-Martini” high school in the same city. The request for annulment of the measure is no longer admissible “due to lack of interest in acting” that is, due to the fact that, more than two years after its enactment, the sanction has lost all effect. But the censorship, according to the appellant, came at the culmination of a long series of episodes of mobbingwhich began six years earlier and consisted of “demeaning and unfairly denigrating conduct on the part of the school director”to use the words of the same sentence.
According to some teachers called to testify, Buscaglia he would repeatedly raise his voice against Formisano and he allegedly discredited the teacher’s work on several occasions, accusing her of being incompetent in front of the students and other teachers. Furthermore, the teacher from Savona had been elected union representative by her colleagues in the three-year period 2019-2021 and also in this field the manager had had numerous reasons for conflict with Formisano “demonstrating -according to the ruling – a personal resentment”.
For the judge “the oral investigation carried out during the case… leaves no room for doubt in relation to the existence of prevaricating and unjustifiably offensive attitudes held and reiterated over time by the school director towards the teacher”.
Buscaglia would therefore have abused his managerial position with conduct “suitable by their nature – we read in the motivation – to make the working environment a source of unfair stress for the worker”.
In short: adestructive attitude” towards the teacher who, according to the court, justifies the conviction for mobbing and not just for “straining“, i.e. for the simple adoption of working conditions “stressogenic”, without, however, a precise persecutory intent.
An attitude, that of the current director of the “Chiabrera” high school, who had at the time pushed the same colleagues of Formisanoto sign a letter of solidarity with the teacher after the censure she received, which she still caused the teacher “a depressive syndrome, verifiable at a medico-legal level, capable of negatively impacting his psycho-physical integrity”.
Already in the recent past the historic Savona school had been the subject of controversies which had the director as the protagonist. Last October, in fact Buscaglia he had ended up in the sights of some of the students’ parents for a circular sent to the families in which he invited them “especially female students to monitor their clothing, reflecting on the fact that, in a multicultural context like the one we are in, clothing that is too casual risks offending the sensibilities of other cultures that now have full right to be
respected.”
The document had provoked more than one reaction – which Buscaglia he had correctly replied, apologizing for what had happened – both because it was not aimed at students of both sexes but only at girls, and because it would not have constituted a form of integration, but an invitation to adapt to a single cultural form.
More recently, the “Chiabrera” high school once again hit the headlines for its decision to dismember one of the final classes for the next school year, aggregating the students to the two remaining classes. The decision, motivated by the lack of teaching staff (some teachers will be used to maintain the 3 sections at the gymnasium) was not liked by the students, who also complain of having been faced with a fait accompli, without any prior consultation.
