OIL AND NATURAL GAS COMMISSION Vs. WORKMEN

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is an appeal by special leave from the Award of the National Industrial Tribunal, New Delhi dated November 18, 1971. While granting special leave on February 24, 1972, this Court directed that costs of the respondents should in any event be paid by the appellant.

(2.) By notification dated August 21, 1968 (No. S. O. 3088) the Central Government constituted a National Industrial Tribunal at Dhanbad with Shri Kamal Sahai as the Presiding Officer and referred to for adjudication the following Industrial dispute :

(3.) The appellant, the Oil and Natural Gas Commission, has several Projects and workshops in the country. At Baroda it has a central workshop which controls all the workshops in the western region. The workmen are liable to be transferred for exigencies of service from one workshop to another as also from one region to another. At Baroda, when the workshop was under construction and there was insufficient accommodation at the site of the workshop, the office/administrative staff used to work in a shed at a distance of about 2 k.m. from the workshop. At that time the working hours of the administrative staff were from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with an interval of half an hour. These working hours lasted from Dec., 1964 to June 1965, when on completion of the construction at the site of the workshop the administrative staff shifted there. With this shifting of the office to the site of the factory the working hours of the administrative staff were fixed from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with an interval of one hour. These facts are not in dispute. The workmen claimed that working hours of the administrative staff should have continued to be 61/2 hours per day and complained that fixation of 8 hours per day with effect from June, 1965 was violative of Section 9-A of the Industrial Disputes Act (hereinafter called the Act.) It was further complained that the fixation of 8 hours per day was not justified from the point of view of convenience and was also at variance with the practice uniformly prevailing in other administrative offices of the workshops of the Oil and Natural Gas Commission.