SHAMSUDDIN Vs. STATE OF KERALA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The writ petitioner in O. P. No. 296/59 is the appellant, and seeks to set aside the award by the Industrial Tribunal, Trivandrum in Dispute No. 1/57. The aforesaid prayer has been rejected by a learned Judge of this Court; hence this appeal.

(2.) The facts leading to the petition, can be shortly stated: The appellant, who is a sub-agent of the Standard Vaccum Oil Company in Quilon, had dismissed three workmen on October 3, 1956. The employees got themselves subsequently enrolled as members of the "Quilon Commercial Staff Association", and on October 19, 1956, a dispute between the employer and the aforesaid association developed, in which the Government had referred two questions to the Tribunal, by order of January 8, 1957. Before the Tribunal, the dismissed workers, on January 28, 1957 filed a petition, praying that in the proceedings they may be allowed to be represented by the Quilon Commercial and Industrial Employees' Association, because they had, after the reference, resigned the membership of the former and had joined the latter association. On February 16, 1957, the Secretary of the Quilon Industrial Commercial Staff Association also submitted to the Tribunal a petition that his association did not desire to prosecute the claim, and that the Tribunal be pleased to drop all the proceedings. The Tribunal allowed the three workmen's prayer, for permitting the Quilon Commercial and Industrial Employees' Association to represent them; and, nearly two years later, i. e., on February 13, 1959, the award in the case was given.

(3.) The appellant has challenged the legality of the award on several grounds, and one of these is that the dispute could not be referred to the Tribunal as the quarrel was between individual workers and their employer, there being no Union, of which the dismissed employees were members at the time they were dismissed. The appellant's learned counsel had argued that any subsequent sponsoring by the Union, whose members, the dismissed workers had later become, would not convert the dispute initially outside the Industrial Disputes Act, hereinafter referred to as the Act, into one covered by the Act. The learned Judge, who heard the writ petition, has rejected the argument on the ground that, if the dispute be between the Union and the employer, that would amount to an industrial dispute, notwithstanding its being at its initial stage a quarrel between individual workers and their employer.