Covid: Del Conte, ‘green pass law in a constitutional company, saying no is just a pretext’

“A law that imposes the Green Pass on work would be in full coherence with constitutional principles not against it. And it would also be in coherence with the long history of battles to improve the health and safety conditions of workers. If we also consider that Covid is recognized by Inail as an occupational disease and therefore compensable if derived from the workplace, then the circle closes perfectly: there is no real reason not to take all the measures to prevent a pathological onset. their responsibilities: if you want to support your opposition to the vaccine, do it openly and say it but do not hide behind non-existent pretexts or legal reasons “. Thus the labor lawyer Maurizio Del Conte, in conversation with the Adnkronos, shares the need for the government to change a law with which to make the anti-covid vaccination certification mandatory for the access of workers to the company. “If the most effective measure today is the vaccine, and it seems to me there are now few doubts, it seems to me a duty to proceed along this path, not an option. And we must proceed by law because the problem is precisely that of reaching the quota of workers who have not been vaccinated: it is clear that either there is a rule of law or we would remain uncertain “, adds Del Conte, disputing the union criticisms of a normative hypothesis accused of perpetrating a discriminatory form of control. A possible new Health Protocol, he says, along the lines of that of April 2020 that the social partners could re-sign would not have the same force as a norm. “It would be about updating those protocols signed in April 2020 at a time when the vaccine seemed a mirage, a hoped-for but remote hypothesis. But I don’t think we are talking about this, or that it is on the horizon at the moment. the crux is not even this: it is, rather, that an agreement would not guarantee the application of the provisions of the new Protocol: and if, in companies, agreements on vaccination control are not made? With the consequence that everything would remain ‘hanging’ on a matter in which uncertainties cannot be tolerated “, adds Del Conte for whom” there are so many issues that it is good that regulation is left to the social partners, starting with remuneration, but here we are talking about health, about a virus whose danger deriving from its spread through social contact seems to me to be overt. The truth, continues Del Conte, “is that no one at this moment of yours, and for me it remains a mystery, has the courage to say that we must force people to get vaccinated”, he adds. that “the constitution and the rules on health and safety in the workplace give full justification to an intervention by the legislator” who wanted to make vaccination certification mandatory for the workplace. “There are two fundamental principles that would make it possible: the protection of health to which the duty to guarantee health in the workplace is connected”, he says, recalling how it is now an “absolutely consolidated” concept by jurisprudence which the employer must “prepare all the means that according to the technique are suitable for preparing and guaranteeing, or preventing”, any form of damage to the health of the worker. “And in this sense there is no doubt that the vaccine, for what it has shown on the basis of objective data is a safeguarding tool for health “, he continues. However, he adds, “Article 32, second paragraph of the Constitution also says that no one can be subjected to medical treatment except by virtue of the law: therefore, in my view, a law is necessary to impose this obligation. in fact, the employer could not ask workers for the Green pass “, he concludes.