Labour Courts can find out real employer while hearing plea for reinstatement or backwages: HC
It is not illegal for Labour Courts, dealing with applications made by workmen under Section 2A(2) of the Industrial Disputes Act seeking reinstatement and backwages, to embark on an enquiry and find out the actual employer especially when there are allegations of camouflage to deny statutory benefits to the labourers, the Madras High Court has held.
In a judgement reserved in the Principal Seat of the High Court in Chennai but delivered in the Madurai Bench, Justice T.S. Sivagnanam agreed that a labour court could neither grant a relief that had not been claimed by the workmen nor pass an award in excess of the demand made by the workmen. However, such restrictions would not preclude the court from finding out the exact dispute between the parties, adjudicate it and grant appropriate relief to the applicants, he said.
The ruling was passed while dismissing a writ petition filed by the management of Needle Industries at Ketti in Coonoor Taluk of Nilgiris district in 2003. The company had challenged an order passed by the Coimbatore Labour Court on May 27, 2002 in favour of 47 workmen. However, since the writ petition was pending for nearly a decade, 44 of them had agreed for a settlement offered by the company.
Contesting the labour court’s order only with respect to three employees, the management contended that the court had overreached its jurisdiction and rendered a finding that the writ petitioner was the real employer of the workmen, who had raised the industrial dispute, though they were actually employed with 10 different enterprises that were functioning within the petitioner’s premises.
Disagreeing with the contention, the judge said that he did not find anything perverse or illegal in the labour court’s decision as it had been established that the Directors of all the 10 enterprises where none other than full time managerial employees of the petitioner concern. He wondered how these managerial employees could have headed independent enterprises within their employer’s premises.
“In the standard terms and conditions of employment, a prudent employer will impose a condition that during the course of employment, the employee shall not either directly or indirectly engage himself in any other employment, business or other avocation… In such circumstances, it is rather surprising to note that employees of petitioner management were running independent units,” he said.
The judge also pointed out that one of the ten enterprises was dissolved when its Director S. Stephen Daniel resigned from the petitioner company and the employees of that firm were shifted to other concerns. “If really S. Stephen Daniel was an independent owner/Director of the said concern, the question of dissolving such concern or making it a non-entity on his resignation is beyond one’s comprehension,” he added.
via The Hindu Newspaper http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/high-court-ruling-on-labour-courts/article4469854.ece
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