The supervisor, as indicated in Article 19 of Legislative Decree No. 81/2008, “in addition to supervising and monitoring compliance by individual workers with their legal obligations, as well as with company provisions on occupational health and safety and on the use of collective protective equipment and personal protective equipment made available to them”, is required to:
- provide the necessary safety instructions if behavioural non-compliance is detected with respect to the provisions and instructions issued by the Employer and the Manager;
- interrupt the worker’s activity and inform direct superiors in the event of failure to implement the provisions or persistence of non-compliance;
- temporarily interrupt the activity and promptly report non-compliance to the Employer and the Manager, where necessary, in the event of deficiencies in work equipment and machinery and any dangerous condition.
The supervisor, identified by the Employer and the Manager and formally appointed, requires adequate and specific training in relation to his or her duties concerning health and safety in the workplace, with a minimum duration of 8 hours, as indicated in paragraph 7 of Article 37 of Legislative Decree No. 81/2008. This is additional training compared to that already provided for all workers. This means that the supervisor must in any case first have completed general and specific worker training, common to all company risk macro-categories. At the end of the training course, after attending at least 90% of the training hours, it is necessary to take an assessment test, after passing which the training body issues the certificate.
With regard to the training method and the frequency of periodic updating, with a minimum duration of 6 hours, reference must instead be made to paragraph 7-ter of Article 37 of Legislative Decree No. 81/2008, introduced by Conversion Law No. 215/2021 of Decree-Law No. 146/2021: “In order to ensure the adequacy and specificity of training as well as the periodic updating of supervisors pursuant to paragraph 7, the related training activities must be carried out entirely in person and must be repeated at least every two years and in any case whenever made necessary due to the evolution of risks or the emergence of new risks”.
Paragraph 7-ter of Article 37 therefore refers back to paragraph 7, which in turn refers to the second sentence of paragraph 2, in which reference is made to a new State-Regions Agreement on training that should have entered into force by 30 June 2022 but which in reality, to date, has not yet been adopted: ”By 30 June 2022, the Permanent Conference for relations between the State, the Regions and the Autonomous Provinces of Trento and Bolzano shall adopt an agreement in which it provides for the consolidation, review and amendment of the implementing agreements of this decree on training, in order to guarantee:
- a) the identification of the duration, minimum content and methods of mandatory training for the employer;
- b) the identification of the methods of the mandatory final learning assessment for learners in all mandatory training and refresher courses on occupational health and safety, and the methods for verifying the effectiveness of training during the performance of work”.
It would therefore seem reasonable to think that, pending the entry into force of the new agreement, the reference for supervisor training remains State-Regions Agreement No. 221 of 21 December 2011 (updating at least every five years), as also indicated by the National Labour Inspectorate (INL) in Circular No. 1/2022 published on 16 February 2022: In the absence of the new agreement, managers and supervisors must therefore be trained according to what is already provided by current agreement No. 221 of 21 December 2011 adopted by the Permanent Conference pursuant to the first sentence of paragraph 2 of Article 37 of Legislative Decree No. 81/2008, which was not affected by the amendments introduced by Decree-Law No. 146/2021”. However, there are those who instead argue that what is stated in the above-mentioned circular conflicts with the literal interpretation of paragraph 7-ter of Article 37 of Legislative Decree No. 81/2008, since the Consolidated Act does not establish any connection between the two-year training obligation for supervisors and the new State-Regions Agreement.
Given the lack of clarity and considering the new criminally sanctioned obligations of the supervisor introduced in 2021 by Decree-Law No. 146/2021 (Article 19 and Article 56 of Legislative Decree No. 81/2008), it is advisable to bring forward the timing of periodic updating (at least every two years). It is also important to underline that, from 21 December 2023 (2 years after the entry into force of Conversion Law No. 215/2021), in the event of violations of paragraphs 7 and 7-ter of Article 37 of Legislative Decree No. 81/2008, the Employer and the Manager could be subject to sanctions: arrest from two to four months or fines from 1,474.21 to 6,388.23 euros (Article 55, paragraph 5 of Legislative Decree No. 81/2008).
