K TAPPANNAH Vs. STATE OF MYSORE

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The petitioner before who is the proprietor of a Hotel in Bangalore, challenges the validity of a notification published by the State Government on July 16, 1960, fixing under the provisions of section 3 of the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, minimum rates of wages payable to five classes, of employees in residential hotels and eating houses.

(2.) Section 3 of the Minimum Wages Act empowers the appropriate Government to fix minimum rates of wages payable to employees in the employments specified in Parts I and II of the schedule to that Act. Residential hotels and eating houses were not included not in the schedule when the Minimum Wages Act was enacted. But section 27 of the Act empowered the appropriate Government to add to either part of the schedule any employment in respect of which it is of opinion that minimum rates of wages should be fixed, by the adoption of the procedure prescribed in that section. Under the provisions of that section residential hotels and eating houses were added to Part I of the schedule to the Act, by notification made by the State Government on July 18 , 1959.

(3.) There after the State Government published proposals under section 5(1)(b) of the Act for the fixation of minimum of rates of wages payable to employees in residential hotels and eating houses, and after affording an opportunity to the persons likely to be affected by the fixation of minimum rates of wages in that way, it fixed minimum rates of wages in consultation with the Advisory Board constituted under Section 7 of the Act. The minimum rates of wages so fixed were notified in the notification published on July 16, 1960 in which it was specified that those minimum rates of wages were payable to employees in residential hotels and eating houses in the municipal limits of Bangalore, Mysore, Hubli, Mangalore and Belgaum and in the are of the Kolar Gold Fields Sanitary Board. It is this notification which the petitioner assails in this application.