STRAW BOARD MANUFACTURING COMPANY LIMITED Vs. ITS WORKMEN

JUDGEMENT

(1.) A dispute between the appellant mill (the Strawboard Manufacturing Company Ltd.) and its workmen, regarding a scheme of gratuity, was referred to the Industrial Tribunal, way back in Feburary 1958; and, long 19 years later, this Court is pronouncing on the validity of the award made by the Tribunal in favour of the workmen : Small wonder the respondent workmen, after this tiring and traumatic tantalization, have not turned up to argue their cause, although Shri Parekh, as amicus curiae, has filled the gap. Such an unhappy and not infrequent phenomenon as considerable delay in adjudication and implementation is destructive of industrial peace and productive of disenchantment with labour jurisprudence. Naturally, even constitutional provisions and governmental decisions about labout and concern for its welfare cease to achieve the desired goals when the legal process limps and lingers and rights turn illusory when remedies prove elusive. The life of rights is remedies and a jurisprudence of ready reliefs alone can inhibit the weaker numbers of our land asking the disturbing question : 'Is Law Dead?. Dicey wrote long ago :

(2.) IT is more than rhetoric to say that courts belong to be people.

(3.) THE main battle at the bar has been over the correct principles in a scheme of grautity for factory workers and further whether those priciples have been departed from under the award assailed by the appellant. We may mention, at this stage, that the Parliament has enacted the Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972, which has come into force with effect from 16/09/1972. Section 4 (5) of the said Act gives an option to the workers to choose between the gratuity scheme under the award and the one under the statute. Had the workers been represented before this Court it might have been possible for us finally to close this controvercy or even produce a reasonable solution by discussion and negotiation and persuade them to opt for one or the other scheme. Early finality, credible certainly and mutually assented solutions are the finer processes of conflict-resolution - a pursuit which baffles us here because of labour's absence. All that we can do, therefore, is to adjudicate upon the correctness or otherwise of the principles which have gone into the gratuity scheme prepared by the tribunal in the light of the rulings of this Court and the canons of industrial law.