Art. 5 bis, comma 1, letter b) of the Text on Immigration states that the employer has the obligation to pay travel expenses for the worker to his home country.
The employer is right to ask himself this question but unfortunately there is not a straightforward answer.
We can’t give a precise answer because the law only contains a few lines causing the guarantee on behalf of the employer to provide travel expenses to then be inserted in every contract of permit of stay, for those who have to renew their permits, for those who take on a new work contract while their original permit is still valid and also those who arrived in Italy before the promulgation of the rules of execution and who have a valid permit of stay and are simply carrying on with the same work contract.
All the non-EU citizens who will start working or are working have to therefore formalize a contract of stay with their employer containing, among other things, this obligation on the part of the employer to pay the worker’s travel expenses to his home country.
But what journey does it refer to?
It’s difficult to understand what journey to the home country it refers to, whether the definitive one or a temporary one. Most probably, it refers to the definitive return to the country of origin.
We say this in reference also to the electoral slogans that, before the approval of the Bossi-Fini law, stated this same concept, that is, when a worker is no longer useful he’ll have to be sent away and it is the employer who will have to pay for his journey home.
But if we talk about a spontaneous decision to return to the country of origin, does the worker then have the right to have his journey paid for?
By which employer?
If a worker changes employer over the years this obligation will have to pass from one employer to the next. Which employer should be made to pay the travel expenses? The first one or the last one? Why not all those in between, of which there may be many and who may not all reside in the same region of Italy even? In the case of an expulsion or forced return to the country of origin, will the police headquarters for the area turn to the employer for the expenses? So far this has not been made clear.
The carrying out of the Bossi-Fini law – which has accelerated and increased the number of expulsions – has not turned to a single employer for the expenses. In other words, when a person is sent out of the country, there are other funds to pay for the plane ticket or travel expenses, it does not come from the employers wallet. So we can assume that this guarantee to pay travel expenses is not operative in the case of an expulsion.
So if this guarantee to pay travel expenses in the case of enforced return to the country of origin does not work – as it hasn’t worked since the Bossi-Fini law was brought in to force 3 years ago – perhaps it should work in the case of a voluntary return to the country of origin, when the worker himself decides to return to his country definitively? It would be interesting to be present at the discussion between a worker and his employer to see if the true spirit of the regulation is this, that is, the guarantee of a kind of integrative providence for the immigrant worker, a bonus paid by the employer for the expenses of the journey back to the country of origin.
Who knows, perhaps the whole family will be paid for as well!We say this because in reality this regulation acts simply as a kind of smokescreen to reassure the population, to show that the State will not spend money to deal with the presence of foreign workers, that instead it is the employers who will pay for them (as, also, in the case of the famous guarantee of suitable accommodation).
In reality that’s not actually how things are.
I remember that even from 1986 (when the first law on immigration was adopted in Italy) ministerial provisions have stated the obligation on the part of the employer to pay the travel expenses for workers returning to their country of origin.
Yet this obligation has never been enforced, it made up a condition for the release of a permit of stay (as it does now) but was never enforced and no worker has ever actually been called to pay the travel expenses for his workers. This regulation, left behind and forgotten about, was never taken up again because it has already proved itself to be completely useless. Now however, for image reasons, it has been taken up again to provide the public with a false security, that travel expenses for workers to return are being taken care of, in practice, as pointed out by the employer who sent us this question, this regulation is completely impractical.
