THEHis case had been around Italy, now Fabio Giomi, a long-time cashier at the Pam Panorama supermarket in Siena, will have to be reinstated to his job by decision of the judge. He was fired in November after falling into what seemed like a real trap to the unions and also to many citizens, now known throughout Italy as the “trolley test”.
A fake customer, actually a company inspector, had slipped into the cash register with a shopping trolley which included a pack of 15 bottles of beer, inside which small objects had been purposely inserted into the cracks in the packaging, a make-up pencil for example, to simulate an attempted theft which the cashier had not realised.
Result: fired on the spot for not having identified the fake thief. Many people identified with the case, which became public also thanks to the support of the distribution sector unions who organized protestsimagining yourself in line at the supermarket, at rush hour, when at the checkout you are asked above all to hurry, it is difficult to imagine that whoever is handing over the goods purchased could start inspecting everything that passes through their hands, without tripling the queue and creating an insurrection of customers and perhaps even an accusation of inefficiency.
If the practice of the fake customer, known as mystery shopper, is used to monitor company processes and verify areas for improvement and the quality of the service offered to the public, which is however possible provided that the staff is informed that they can be tested with incognito audits, the method implemented in this case seemed to go much beyond this definition, going as far as simulating a theft. Giomi’s defense was based precisely on the illegitimacy of the procedure and therefore of the dismissal.
The case is apparently not isolated, other workers in the same chain have suffered sanctions in Tuscany for the same test. Giomi, after the media outcry, was offered during the mediation phase to accept a 15-day suspension, but the worker, in agreement with the defender and the union representation, refused the offer because it would have meant admitting that he had made a mistake and legitimizing a form of control which, as far as the outcome of the trial suggests, should not have been legitimate.
The reasons will be clarified in the motivations but in the meantime Giomi will return to his job and the company will have to pay the legal costs and the damage caused. «It is an important victory for the union», Mariano Di Gioia, Filcams Cgil secretary, «the sentence establishes that the dismissal of Fabio Giomi was illegitimate and discriminatory. We have to wait for the reasons to go into the merits, but it seems clear to me that it is a verdict destined for jurisprudence. There were three cases of Pam workers fired for the trolley test, only the Siena case came before the judge. But if in the reasons the judge considers the test to be an illegitimate operation, this will be a victory not only for Pam employees, but for all 3 million workers in large-scale distribution and trade groups”. There were several comments made by the union on the test: from the climate of suspicion and tension generated in the work environment to the risk that the methods of the test could hide a “selection” of recipients and lend themselves to targeting individual workers, setting traps for them that are difficult to identify.
