of the type of company concerned and its function. Any business and any work provider must take labour law overall into account, even if it has not, or indeed cannot, be tailored to cover every area of the market. Similar evaluations apply to autonomous or freelance work in all its guises (occasional work, contracts stipulated with freelancers enrolled in professional registers and agreements with freelancers not enrolled in professional registers). If anything, it is necessary to look into the forms which apply most to common organisational models, and ask ourselves how certain general principles are applied in relation to the most common problems faced by companies operating in the field of gastronomy and hospitality. The same reasoning could, at least on an abstract basis, be applied to each economic sector. Just like any other enterprise, gastronomy - related businesses hire, dismiss, change roles, transfer and exercise disciplinary and managerial power over their employees, as well as controlling them and ensuring they observe given working hours, amongst other things. In any case, employers must respect the entire set of provisions which, as a result, they must be familiar with. From a scientific point of view, there is no specific labour law for restaurants. While in the collective imagination at least, catering companies potentially lend themselves to violations of the dignity of female workers with hypothetical cases of harassment or disruption of interpersonal relations, there are no specific provisions in Italian law, even of an administrative nature - that cover them. Nor are there any meaningful instances of case law precedents that specifically highlight the organisational conditions of public establishments. When discussing discrimination, a purely hypothetical case is sometimes mentioned - one created by legal doctrine without any grounds in known rulings. In the context of discriminatory dismissal on religious grounds, an example is cited of “a Muslim worker in a restaurant kitchen refusing to handle pork” (see Barbera, Il licenziamento alla luce del diritto antidiscriminatorio, in Riv. giur. lav., 2013, I, 154 ff.). This poses a complex legal issue. However, there would be no such debate if the same employee were caught stealing beef. Even if it could be proven that the employer had a personal desire to target individuals with different beliefs, demonstrating discrimination in a subjective sense, this would be irrelevant in the face of a lawful dismissal, as the employer’s personal satisfaction in exercising their authority would have no legal bearing. In actual fact, there is no evidence of conflicts of this kind arising in practice. Within the Italian legal system, the working conditions of food delivery riders recently came under the spotlight; protective measures were adopted 202 ENRICO GRAGNOLI
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