Following a decision by the Italian courts, Francesco Bonanno has officially resumed his position as skipper at Trenitalia. He had been fired from the transalpine railway company in 2017 because it accused him of terrorizing passengers by doing his job too meticulously.
Train conductor Francesco Bonanno told daily Il Corriere della Sera on April 24 that “his nightmare was over” after Italy’s Supreme Court ruled in recent days that he had been wrongfully dismissed and ordered his reinstatement. within the national railway company.
This 61-year-old Italian railwayman had been accused of doing his job too zealously by issuing more than 5,000 fines in a few years to passengers in violation of the trains in northern Italy in which he performed his service. All types of offenses were concerned: traveling without a ticket or boarding a train with a ticket for another destination or bearing another date…
Il coqreno zelante slab 5 mila mult: “Non sono spietato, ma servant rigore. The people mi adored” https://t.co/I0sMXOpfOl
— Corriere della Sera (@Corriere) April 24, 2022
Interviewed by the Italian daily, Francesco Bonanno indicated that he “was not a bounty hunter, but at work, you need rigor and that you have to make sure that travelers are all carrying a valid ticket.
dismissed by trenitalia for gross negligence
Following numerous complaints from disgruntled travellers, Trenitalia had initiated a dismissal procedure against him, accusing him of having shown too much rigor and of having made errors in the establishment of 175 fines . These had to be reimbursed by the Italian railway company for a total of around 10,000 euros. Employed for 38 years at Trenitalia, he was dismissed in January 2017 for “just cause”, which corresponds to a dismissal for serious misconduct.
Originally from Sicily, this resident of Jesolo near Venice then took legal action to challenge his dismissal by suing Trenitalia. Before the judges, he explained that the facts of which he had been accused represented only 3.5% of the thousands of fines he had drawn up over the past two years.
After a long legal series, the Italian Supreme Court finally gave him his case and obtained his full and complete reinstatement. She described him as “a train conductor of uncommon zeal, inflexible and exceedingly meticulous in his work” and that he did not seek personal gain. The final judgment brought to light that “errors made when checking tickets” are “the indirect result of overzealousness”.
“It’s the end of a nightmare,” Francesco Bonanno told Corriere della Sera. “From the start, the labor judge agreed with me and the company reinstated me without rehiring me: I stayed at home for a year and a half, receiving my salary without working. For me, it was not a question of money: I wanted to put my uniform back on. I love my job and have great respect for Trenitalia. I come from a family of railway workers and since I was a child I dreamed of spending my day getting on and off train cars,” he added.
“I had never seen an employee fired for working too much,” his lawyer Lucio Spampatti told Corriere della Sera. “If you think about it, this story is paradoxical. It is about a skipper who, by sanctioning passengers without tickets, brought Trenitalia more than 200,000 euros”, he added.