P L D 1960 Supreme Court (Pak (PLP)

CORNELIUS, J.-This is an appeal by special leave granted to consider whether the Industrial Tribunal Lahore, which was appointed to investigate an industrial dispute between the State Bank of India at Lahore and the Employees' Union of the said Bank "followed correct legal principles in recording findings on demands 1, 3 and 7 of the Union". Leave was also granted to consider a legal point, namely, whether evidence recorded by the Tribunal in pursuance of the Government notification dated the 4th March 1958, referring the dispute to the said Tribunal could not be read as evidence by reason of the fact that on the 7th June 1958, the Government issued a fresh notification referring the same dispute to the same Tribunal. As the points for consideration in this appeal fall within a narrow compass it is not necessary to state the circumstances of the dispute in detail. As regards demands Nos. 1 and 3, the case for the employees was that the scales of pay at Lahore were lower than those paid by the Back to its employees at its Branch in. Karachi,' during the period between 1st July 1951 and 31st December 1955, and that they were entitled to the salary on the same scales as at Karachi, on the basis of parity. Demand No. 1 was for payment of arrears of salary for the periods specified, at the higher rates demanded, and demand No. 7 was for payment of additional bonus in relation to such higher salary. As for the honorarium, the basis of the demand was as follows. There was a strike by the employees which led to the reference. It commenced on the 13th February 1958 and lasted till the 18th February 1958. Owing to this strike there was dislocation of work in the Bank, resulting in accumulation of some arrears. When, on the 18th February 1958, the strike was called off, the Genera! Secretary 0the Union informed the Agent of the Bank that ;- "arrears of work which have accrued through the strike period will not be cleared by overtime work, but, of course, on your instructions the current work for the day, if unfinished, will be completed by working overtime against payment. The members of the staff will of course try and clear as much as possible of the accrued arrears of work during office hours. For this, honorarium has already been claimed". When the strike was called off, the Agent of the Bank had informed the employees that full salary and allowances will be paid to the concerned staff for the entire' strike period as agreed to by Bombay Head Office. This promise was faithfully implemented but as to the claim for honorarium, the Agent Mr. A. U. Sheikh said that he had informed the staff that if the clearance of arrears needed overtime work, the staff would be paid for such overtime work according to the regulations. It was in reply to this that the Union had declared as appears from the quotations reproduced above, that they would not clear the arrears by working overtime, but would only work overtime to finish the current work of each day. In actual fact, as stated by Mr. Sheikh the Agent, "the arrears which had accumulated during these days were cleared by the staff in two or three days during normal working hours". As regards the legal question of the relevance of the evidence recorded at the earlier stage of the proceedings, the factual position is as follows. The original notification referring the case to the Tribunal is of date the 4th March 1958. The law as it stood at that time required that the Tribunal should submit its report within three months of the reference. The question whether this provision in the law was merely in the nature of a direction that such cases should not ordinarily be prolonged beyond the period of three months, or was mandatory in the sense that if the report was not made within three months, the whole proceeding was thereby avoided, need not be considered, in this judgment. It has not been raised in the present case. What is relied upon is that the Government on the 7th June 1958; issued a fresh notification referring the same case on exactly the same demands to the same Tribunal. This notification was issued upon the initiative of the Tribunal who had reported that it had not been possible for him in spite of every effort to bring the case to a conclusion within the time prescribed, and therefore the request was made "that extension of time may be allowed and if a new notification is necessary for this purpose it may kindly be issued". The Government apparently did not consider itself qualified under the law as it then stood to grant an extension, but instead it made a fresh reference. By the time the fresh reference was made, all the oral witnesses with the exception of one person had been examined. For the com pletion of the remaining proceedings, a number of extensions of time were duly notified by the Government under the law which had been by that time amended to enable the making of such extensions. The record clearly shows that the proceeding commenced under the first notification was continued without interruption and change whatsoever under the second notification and thereafter under the extension orders until its completion. From the start to the finish it remained a single proceeding exhibiting a complete continuity so that the suggestion that the proceedings which commenced after the issue of the second notification were distinct from the proceedings which bad been held previously under the first notification, is plainly contrary to the facts, and is founded upon a mere technicality. The argument against the relevancy of the evidence recorded prior to issue of the second notification could only have succeeded if there were any substantial ground for regarding the earlier proceeding as being res inter alias acts. In fact, that proceeding was clearly inter partes, and in complete .and uninterrupted continuity with the subsequent proceedings, and we entertain no doubt that the evidence recorded prior to the first notification was correctly made use of by counsel for the presentation of their respective cases at the close, and equally it was available in law to the Tribunal for the decision of the case. Mr. David for the appellant, namely, the State Bank of India was obliged to admit that his predecessor appearing for the Bank before the Tribunal had made use of this evidence for the presentation of the Bank's case. This legal objection is clearly devoid of force. The Tribunal awarded to the employees salaries between the dates 1st July 1951 and 31st December 1955, at the scales which were being paid to equivalent staff at the Bank's Branch at Karachi during that period. Consequentially, it made an order for the payment of bonus for the period, and for the subsequent period up to the date of the order. The grounds put forward for this award were briefly as follows. The demand for parity with Karachi was initiated in February 1952. The nature of the work at the two Branches was identical ; prices of imported articles at Lahore were higher than at Karachi because of addition of octroi and railway freight ; the staff incurred extra expenditure at Lahore because the winters and summers at Lahore were much more severe than at Karachi ; the housing shortage was acute in both places ; there had been an award of the Tribunal upon a dispute between the same Bank and its employees in India called the Shastri Award, the benefits of which were not given to the staff at Lahore. The reasons put forward by the Tribunal are both superficial as well as unconvincing, and they fail to take into account the very clear grounds upon which the Bank had refused to intro duce parity of pay scales between Lahore and Karachi until the 1st January- 1956. These grounds appear clearly from the following facts and documents. The Lahore Branch had been under the control of the Calcutta office of the State Bank of India until the 1st July 1953, when it came under the control of the Bombay office of that Bank. The Karachi. Branch was always under the control of the Bombay office. In a letter to the Union dated the 12th March 1955, the Agent communicated the view of the Bombay office that they were unable to accept the contention of the Union "that the scales of salaries and allowances of the clerical, cash department and subordinate staff of the Bank should be identical irrespective of the place whereat they are posted" and adding that "this position does not obtain in India and we are not prepared to extend it to our branches in Pakistan". It is undeniable that a commercial Bank operating at Karachi which was then the Capital of Pakistan, and is a seaport town with a great foreign trade, could not but have greater importance, owing to the greater volume of work, than could possibly be the case with a Provincial Capital of an inland Province. Although the matter was not put in these terms in the letter quoted above, the reason for the refusal to place the Branches of Karachi and Lahore on the same level of importance are plain enough. Mr. A. U. Sheikh, the Agent at Lahore on this point said that :

"from the point of view of business, the Karachi Branch of the Bank has been very much bigger, although from the point of numerical strength of the staff, my impression is that Lahore Branch has been bigger during the two years that I had been as Agent here". It is relevant also to mention that in their grounds of appeal to this Court, the Bank have furnished an affidavit to the effect that the Branch at Lahore is running at a loss of some sixty five thousand rupees a year. In 1954, not long after the re-organization which brought the Lahore Branch under the jurisdiction of the Bombay office, a representation for equalisation of salaries was made for the first time in those terms. The Bank first replied by letter dated the 5th April 1954, that the pay and allowances of the staff at Lahore Branch were found to compare favourably with similar pay and allowances paid by other Banks in Lahore, and by a later letter of the 11th September 1954, the employees were informed that their representation had been fully considered, and that the Bank regretted that it was unable "to bring their scales of pay in line with those at Karachi Branch". That attitude was maintained by the Bank until in February 1956, a representation with 71 signatures was made to them by the employees, in which the plea was put forward that on account of the recent formation of the integrated Province of West Pakistan, resulting in an increase in the population of Lahore, and a great rise in prices of consumer goods to unprecedented heights" as well as intensi fication of the problem of housing, it was necessary that all salaries should be revised. The case foe the Bank was that moved by this representation they proceeded to make enquiries and eventually granted the prayer for parity with Karachi with effect from the 1st January 1956. The Tribunal while recording in its judgment the emphasis laid upon this explanation by the Bank has not given consideration to the validity of the expla nation, which has been overlooked on the simple ground that demands for increase of salary had been made continuously from 1952 onwards. In actual fact, the first occasion on which parity with Karachi was, claimed in those terms did not occur until May 1954, and as has been seen, the reply to the suggestion of parity was given in March 1955, viz. that the contention for parity per se could not be accepted and had not been accepted by the Bank in its dealings with its staff in India. When the Bank did allow salaries equal to those which were being paid at Karachi, it did so, upon its own showing, by reason of the representation made in February 1956. That representation was based upon a factual change of circumstances, for it is well-known that West Pakistan was integrated into a single unit of which Lahore was declared to be the Capital in the month of October 1955 and soon after there was a great influx of clerical and other population into Lahore, which undoubtedly affected the general economic conditions in respect of prices of consumer goods and other services such as housing. We consider that the claim for parity irrespective of any clear proof of necessity or other good reason requiring equal remuneration at the two places, could only have succeeded, if it could have been shown by the employees that it was a condition of their service that they would be paid identical scales of salary wherever they might be working in the Circle controlled by the Bombay office. That the employees were unable to do, and it is impossible to resist the contention of the Bank that they were entitled to fix the salaries of their staff at a reasonable figure in relation to the conditions obtaining at the particular place where they were employed. The only circumstance which has been firmly established on the record, and can serve as a guide to the determination of the question whether the salaries at Karachi and Lahore should not have been the same, is that relied upon by the Bank, viz. that through Lahore becoming the capital city of a greatly enlarged Province and its population suffering a great increase in the closing months of 1955, the cost of living in Lahore had gone up very considerably, thus justifying a rise of pay scales. On this view, we consider that the award of the Tribunal that parity with the Karachi office in point of salaries etc. should be allowed from the 1st July 1951 onwards is frauded upon no basis of reason, and is made in denial or ignorance of the very plain and valid reason put forward for their action by the Bank. This award cannot therefore be sustained. Along with the award in respect of salaries must also go the award of bonus in relation to the higher salaries as from the 1st July 1951. This covers the period up to the end of the year, 1955 and as to the subsequent years, it is not clear whether bonus had been declared by the Bank or not, but we entertain no doubt that without the need of any award on the point, such bonus as the Bank has allowed for the years from 1956 onwards will be assessed in relation to the higher salaries which came into force from the 1st January 1956. Accordingly, the award in respect of bonus too cannot be sustained. It remains to consider the question of the honorarium, ' which has been awarded by the Tribunal at the rates demanded by the employees. The grounds given are as follows. Firstly, the strike was resorted to only when all hope of amicable settlement had been abandoned and it was therefore neither unnecessary nor frivolous. Secondly, "if, the Bank had had to get the arrears cleared by persons other than the petitioners; it would have had to pay them emoluments and it was argued that there was no reason way the Bank should not pay the same amount to the petitioners". Thirdly, the employees had declared in advance that they, would not clear the accumulated work "by working after the office hours" and that they demanded an honorarium for this work. Nowhere in the discussion under this demand has the Tribunal referred to the simple statement of the Agent Mr. A. U. Sheikh that all arrears were cleared by the staff in two or three days during normal working hours. That being the case it is difficult to find the slightest ground for allowing any extra payment. For the period of the strike when they did no work the staff were paid in full. In two or three days after the strike had been called off their tables were cleared and this had been achieved without their having been called upon to do any overtime work. In these circumstances, no justification for an honorarium can possibly be thought to appear. The attitude of the employees which has been approved by the Tribunal can be understood only in relation to unwilling mercenaries. The duty of good employees is co-operate with the employer to further .the objects of the employment which in this case were all matters connected with the proper and efficient functioning of the Bank. The running of the affairs of the Bank having suffered dislocation, whether from default of the employees or of the 'employers or through outside agency, that duty would still remain unaffected, and the staff as good employees would be required to co-operate as before with their employers to set the house in order, in fulfilment of their common responsibility. There were denial of responsibility for the strike and the consequential disturbance does not give them the right to say that the disturbance should be put right by another person or persons than themselves, and that they would regard themselves as working outside the terms of their ordinary employment, if they lent a hand for the clearing up of the situation. The duty of willing co-operation is in no way affected by the incident of a strike after the conclusion of which, by mutual consent, the employment was continued. Here it is plain that by the staff working in an ordinary way within the ordinary hours of work, the injury sustained by the affairs of the Bank on account of this strike was remedied. We do not see that for such normal and ordinary working the employees earned any right to any distinct or supplementary remuneration, beyond the salaries they were already receiving. For these reasons, we allow this appeal, and set aside the award of the Tribunal on each one of following three items, namely, Demands Nos. 1, 3. and

7. In all the circumstances, we leave the parties to bear their own costs. A. H. Appeal allowed.