1959 (10) TMI 46

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....8, (since repealed by the Bombay Industrial Relations Act, No. XI of 1947, which came into force on April 15, 1947), the Registrar had made a notification recognising various occupations in cotton textile mills. Folders were put in group 'F' of this notification while clerks were put in group 'H'. In December 1946, the Textile Labour Association of Ahmedabad gave a notice of change to the Mill-owners' Association for standardisation of wages of the various occupations in the cotton textile industry. Thereupon a reference was made by the State Government in June 1947 to the industrial court, which, by the first part of its award, fixed wages for grey-folders doing cut-looking work at ₹ 42-4-0 per mensem. Later the s....

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.... referred to above. Consequently in January 1950, the fourteen respondents who are grey-folders, applied under Section 79 of the Bombay Industrial Relations Act to the labour court that they were not being paid the grade fixed by Clause (5) of the agreement and this amounted to an unlawful change by the employer and that it should be ordered to withdraw such an illegal change. This application was dismissed by the labour court in April 1952. It. was of opinion that the evidence showed beyond all doubt that the applicants before it were operatives and could not be considered as clerks who were doing routine work of writing, copying or making calculations. There was an obvious error in this view of the labour court for the grey-folders had no....

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....ges withheld for the period from September 1953 to February 1954. The application was opposed by the appellant and it raised all kinds of objections, technical and otherwise. The main objections, however, were two, namely : (1) that the Authority had no jurisdiction to entertain such an application; and (2) that in view of the earlier decisions of the industrial court in 1948 and the labour court in 1952, the folders were estopped from making a claim for wages under Clause (5) of the agreement. The Authority held that it had jurisdiction to decide the application and that there was no question of any estoppel. It then went into the merits and came to the conclusion, looking to the duties performed by the folders, that they were clearly....

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....llant so far as the jurisdiction of the Authority is concerned; but we do not propose to decide this question of jurisdiction in the instant case because we have in addition to the determination of the Authority the fact that the appellant went to the High Court by a writ petition against the decision of the Authority and its petition was dismissed by the High Court. The present appeal is not directly from the judgment of the Authority but is from the order of the High Court dismissing the writ petition. Whatever infirmities might have attached to the order of the Authority, there would in our opinion be no reason to interfere with the order of the High Court dismissing the writ petition, if we come to the conclusion that the order passed b....