- (1.) Every litigation has a moral and, these appeals have many, the foremost being that the economics of law is the essence of labour jurisprudence.
(2.) An affluent Management and an indigent work force are the two wings of the Gujarat Steel Tubes Ltd. which manufactures steel tubes in the outskirts of Ahmedabad city and is scarred by an industrial dispute resulting in these appeals. The industry, started in 1960, went into production since 1964 and waggled from infancy to adulthood with smiling profits and growling workers, punctuated by smoldering demands, strikes and settlements, until there brewed a confrontation culminating in a head-on collision following upon certain unhappy happenings. A total strike ensued, whose chain reaction was a wholesale termination of all the employees, followed by fresh recruitment of workmen, de facto breakdown of the strike and dispute over restoration of the removed workmen. This cataclysmic episode and its sequel formed the basis of S. IO-A arbitration and award, a writ petition and judgment, inevitably spiralling up to this court in two appeals one by the Management and the other by the Union which have been heard together and are being disposed of by this common judgment. The arbitrator held the action of the Management warranted while the High court reversed the award and substantially directed reinstatement.
(3.) A few fundan Kntal issues, factual and legal, on which bitter controversy raged at the bar. settle the decisional fate of this case. A plethora of precedents has been cited and volumes of evidence read for our consideration by both sides. But the jural resolution of labour disputes must be sought in the law-life complex, beyond the factual blinkers of decided cases, beneath the lexical littleness of statutory texts, in the economic basics of industrial justice which must enliven the consciousness of the court and the corpus juris. This court has developed labour law on this broad basis and what this court has declared holds good for the country. We must first fix the founding faith in this juristic branch before unravelling the details of the particular case.;