LexINDIAN HUME PIPE CO. LTD. versus THEIR WORKMEN
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INDIAN HUME l'lft 00. LTD. v. mmt WORDIEN February 8, 1968 A [G. K. MITTER AND K. S. llEGDE, JJ.] B Industrial Dispute-Closure-Tribunal whethu can go into bona ftdes ·of closur.-Retrench,,..nt- 'Last co,,.. (int flO'-TribunaJ not compe- .tent to app~v principle without plea beinr raised. The· lodQStrial Tribunal, deciding a dispule between. the appellant ·company and its workmen held that the notice of clooure given by the -compny waa not bona fide and that the ptjnciple of 'Jaat come first go' C should have been applied by the company in retrenching twelve of its ·workmen. In appear-to this Court. HELD: (i) Once the Tribunal finds that an employer has closed his factory as a mailer of fact it is not concerned to go into the question· aa to the motive which guided him and to come to a conclusion that be- ·cause of the previous history -0f the dispute between the employer ond the employees the closure waa · not justified Such a closure cannot give D rise to an industrial dispute. [l35 DJ PiprGich Sugar Mills Ltd. v. P.SM. Mazdoor Union, (1957) 1 L.L.J. 235, K. M. Padmanabha Ayyar v. State of Madras, [1954) 1 L.L.J. 469, Tea Districts Labour Association, Calcuttt.• v. Ex..employees of Tea Districts Labour .Association and Anr. [1960) 3 S.C.R. 207, Hatisi11gh Manufacturing Co. Ltd. v. Union of India, (1960) ) S.C.R. 52~. Express E New•papers (P} Ltd; v. The Work.rs, A.l.R. 1963 S.C. 569 and Andhra Probha v. Madras Union of Journalist1; [1967) 3 S.C.R. 901, applied. (ii) The plea as to the application. of the principle 'last come first go' was not taken in ¢he written statement of the UniOn and the Tribunal was not competent to go into that qtlestion at all. (135 Fl CIVIL APPELLATE JURISDICTION : Civil Appeal No. 1829 of 1967. Appeal by special leave from the Award dated June 30, 1967 of the Third Industrial Tribunal, West Bengal in Case No. VIII-87 -of 1965. F M. C. Setalvad, K. P. Mookerjee and l. N. Shroff, for the appellant. G lanqrdan Sharma and S. K. Nandi, for th.e respondents. The Judgment of the Court was delivered by Mitter, J. This is an appeal by special leave against an award dated June 30, 1967 of the Third Industrial Trjbunal, West Ben- gal, in Case No. VIII-87 of 1965 finding that the retrenchment of 12 workmen and the closure of the factory of the appellant were both illegal and unjustified. The Tribunal accordingly directed H • A B c D E F G H INDIAN HUME PIPE. co. "· WORKMEN (Mitter, /.) 131 that the workers whose services had been purported to be tenninat- ed on the ground of closure must be deemed to be still in service of the company and they should receive all their wages and allow- ances with effect from the date when their services were terminated. The two issues which '.!Vere referred by the order of the Gov- ernment of West BC!lgal dated April 23, 1965 under s. 10 of the Industrial Disputes Act between the appellant Company and their workmen were : ( 1) Whether the closure of the factory at Barakar is bona fide and in the circumstances justified ? To what relief, if any, are the workn)en entitled ? ( 2) Whether the retrenchment of the following workmen is justified ? To what relief, if any, are they entitled? (1} Kuldip Goala, (2) Chandra Bahadur, (3) Gour Baidyakar, ( 4) Pradip Kumar Dey, ( 5) Dular Chand Prasad, (6) Gangadhar Pandey, (7) Mahendra Bhagat, ( 8) Sunil Kumar Chatterjee, ( 9) Balai Chan- dra Ghose, ( 10) Surendra Kumbhakar, ( 11 ) Sagar Chandra Ghose, ( 12) Pares.h Gope. The facts about which there is no dispute are as follows. The appellant is a big engineering concern with its head office at Bombay and factories and establishments numbering about sixty spread all over India and CeylOQ. In West Bengal it had two factories, one at Barakar and the other Rt Konnagore near Calcutta. The distanee between the two factories is about 140 miles. The Barakar factory had about 85 workmen daily-rated as well as monthly-rated. The factory was situated qwte close to Grand Trunk road. The whole area of the factory and its surroundings including the Grand Trunk road was coal bearing land from which coal had been extracted towards the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth century. On December 18, 1962 there was a subsidence of the earth towards the north of the Grand Trunk road passing through Barakar town affecting a sur- face area of about I 00' X 60'. This is corroborated by
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