Commissioner and Secretary, Printing and Stationery Department Haryana and Another vs The Presiding Officer, Labour Court and Another

Mukul Mudgal, C.J.—This judgment shall dispose of L.P.A No. 481 of 2009, and CWP Nos. 885, 893, 1644, 2639, 2641, 2642, 2643, 2644, 2645, 2646, 2659, 2669, 2675, 2744, 2798, 4682, 4689, 4692, 4755 and 4761 of 2010, since all the writ petitions would be covered by the decision of the judgment under appeal and by this judgment. Facts are being taken from LPA No. 481 of 2009.

Originally, CWP No. 9983 of 2008 was filed by Jagdish Chander and 450 other workers including Respondent No. 2 (workmen) with the prayer that the Appellants could not compel them to perform duties on Saturday which was declared as a public holiday. The said writ petition was allowed on 24.8.2004 by placing reliance on a decision of the Hon''ble Supreme Court reported as Municipal Employees Union (Regd) Sirhind and Ors. v. State of Punjab and Ors. (2000) 9 SCC 432, and in the same terms with the following directions:

(a) The Petitioners may file appropriate application u/s 33C(2) of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 (for brevity, the Act) and on proper computation may be found entitled to extra wages for each of the Saturdays on which they might have worked while their colleagues belonging to ministerial staff and holding technical and non-technical posts have enjoyed Saturdays and holidays.

(b) If it is shown by the Respondent that at the relevant time any instructions were issued under which the working conditions of the staff members were uniformly prescribed to be six days in a week, then the question of granting monetary benefit to the Petitioners would not survive.

(c) On the fulfillment of all the conditions, appropriate relief u/s 33C(2) of the Act may be granted to the Petitioners but the same has to be confined to three years immediately preceding the filing of the instant petition and thereafter continuously upto date. Therefore, in the application to be filed u/s 33C(2) of the Act, the Petitioners have to restrict their claim accordingly.

(d) If any employee has retired during the pendency of the proceedings, then the benefits which may be required to be computed, would obviously be available to him or her till the date of retirement.

(e) If the Petitioners file any such application u/s 33C(2) of the Act within a period of three months, then the same may be disposed of expeditiously as early as possible preferably within a period of six months from the date of filing of such application.

The said judgment became final since the L.P.A and S.L.P against the same were dismissed. As per the direction, the workmen filed individual applications u/s 33C(2) of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 (for short "the Act"), which were allowed by the Labour Court. It was against that order that the writ petition (out of which the present appeal arises) was filed. The learned Single Judge having dismissed the writ petition, the matter is before us.

The primary contention of the Appellants is that in a subsequent decision reported as Sat Pal Puri Vs. Punjab State Electricity Board and Others, , the Hon''ble Supreme Court held that such employees like Respondent No. 2-workman would not be entitled to claim the benefit of Saturday being a public holiday.

The question before this Court is whether the subsequent decision could deprive Respondent No. 2 from the right accrued to him under a judgment which has attained finality. It cannot also be lost sight of that an application u/s 33C(2) of the Act is in the nature of execution proceedings as has been held by the Hon''ble Supreme Court in D. Krishnan and Anr. v. Special Officer, Vellore Coop. S.M and Anr. 2008(4) SCT 163. Further, in Raghavendra Rao Etc. Vs. State of Karnataka and Others Etc., , the Hon''ble Supreme Court held as follows:

As noticed herein before, leave had been granted to avail any other remedy available only to those Petitioners who had not been paid their salary for the period during which they worked as Accountants. The claim of the Appellants is, thus, barred under the principles of res judicata, the earlier judgment having attained a finality. It is now a well settled principle of law that the principle of res judicata applies also to the writ proceedings.

The learned Advocate General, Haryana has, on the other hand, relied upon a decision in R.A No. 111 of 2003 in CWP No. 20222 of 2002, Vijay Kumar and Ors. v. Punjab State Electricity Board and Ors., decided on 7.3.2003, wherein a Division Bench of this Court had allowed the review application against another judgment passed on the basis of Municipal Employees Union (Regd) Sirhind and others'' case (supra), and argued that in that case also, the Division Bench had earlier passed a similar direction as was passed in CWP No. 9983 of 2008 (supra) but once the decision in Sat Pal Puri''s case (supra) was brought to its notice, the order was reviewed and relief was declined to persons similarly situated like the private Respondent/s herein.

In our opinion, the aforesaid judgment would not have no applicability since that was a review of the substantive decision. In the present case, as has been noticed above, the substantive decision has become final right up to the Hon''ble Supreme Court. Even the remedy of filing review petition is barred to the Appellants. Though the provisions of the Code of CPC may not be applicable stricto sensu to writ jurisdiction, yet the principles thereof, being based as they are on equity and policy, cannot be held to be entirely irrelevant. It was open to the Appellants to have filed a review application before the Hon''ble Supreme Court (since the judgments of the Single Bench and the Division Bench had merged into the final order of the Hon''ble Supreme Court). That having not been done, the cited decision can have no applicability to the present case. In this regard, the learned Single Judge also held that `in the light of the above all the submissions which have been put-forth by the learned Counsel for the Petitioners which arise from these very grounds cannot be adjudicated upon in the present proceedings after the dismissal of the Letters Patent Appeal and the Special Leave to Appeal preferred by the Petitioners. The grounds which have been pressed into service by the Petitioners in the present writ petition have already been taken by them in the proceedings preferred against the order dated 24.8.2004 passed in C.W.P No. 9983 of 1988 before a Division Bench of this Court and thereafter in the Supreme Court.

Even with regard to the subsidiary question regarding parity between those who had approached this Court and those who directly filed applications u/s 33C(2) of the Act without approaching this Court, we find that the learned Single Judge has correctly noticed that this Court had earlier decided the rights as a class and, therefore, it cannot be held that applications u/s 33C(2) of the Act could be filed only by the Petitioners therein.

In the circumstances, we uphold the decision of the learned Single Judge and dismiss this appeal, as well as the writ petitions with no order as to costs.