ROHTAS INDUSTRIES LIMITED Vs. ROHTAS INDUSTRIES STAFF UNION

JUDGEMENT

(1.) We permit ourselves a few preliminary observations disturbingly induced by the not altogether untypical circumstances of these two appeals, before proceeding to state the facts set out the submissions and decide the points.

(2.) Industrial law in India has not fully lived up to the current challenges of industrial life. both in the substantive norms or regulations binding the three parties - the State. Management and Labour-and in the processual system which has baulked, by dawdling dysfunction, early finality and prompt remedy in a sensitive area where quick solution is of the very essence of real justice. The legislative and judicial processes have promises to keep if positive industrial peace; in tune with distributive economic justice and continuity of active production, were to be accomplished. The architects of these processes will, we hopefully expect, fabricate creative changes in the system normative and adjectival.

(3.) The two appeal before us, passported by special leave under Art. 136, relate to an industrial dispute with its roots in 1948, meandering along truce, union rivalry and the like, into strikes and settlements, the last of which led to an arbitration award in 1959 which, in turn, prompted two writ petitions before the High Court. After a spell of a few years they ripened into a judgment. Appeals to this Court followed and, after long gestation of six years for preparation of papers and a like period for the cases to be ready for final hearing or parturition, in all 12 years after the grant to leave, they have now come up. By this cumulative lapse of time the generation of workers who struck work two decades ago have themselves all but retired, the representative union itself which sponsored the dispute has, the other side faintly states, ceased to command representative character, the Managements themselves have out of many motives, disclaimed the intention to recover the huge sums awarded to them by the arbitrators and the only survival after death, as it were, is a die-hard litigation tied up to a few near-academic but important, legal points for adjudication by the highest Bench. On this elegiac note we will enter the relevant area of facts and law since we must decide cases brought before us, however stale the lis.