G. M. Talang And Others vs Shaw Wallace And Co. And Anr

Rewritten Version Notice: This is a rewritten version of the original judgment.

Court: Supreme Court of India

Case Number: Civil Appeal No. 513 of 1963

Decision Date: 24 March 1964

Coram: K.C. Das Gupta, P.B. Gajendragadkar, K.N. Wanchoo

In the case titled G. M. Talang and Others versus Shaw Wallace and Co. and Another, decided on 24 March 1964, the Supreme Court of India rendered its judgment. The opinion was authored by Justice K. C. Das Gupta and the bench was composed of Justice K. C. Das Gupta, Justice P. B. Gajendragadkar and Justice K. N. Wanchoo. The petitioners were G. M. Talang together with several co‑workers and the respondents were Shaw Wallace and Co. along with an additional party. The date of judgment was 24 March 1964 and the case is reported at 1964 AIR 1886 and 1964 SCR (7) 422, with later citations in RF 1967 SC 948, E 1984 SC 356 and R 1987 SC 51. The dispute arose out of an industrial question concerning the age of retirement of employees in the Bombay region and whether a trend previously recorded by the Supreme Court was accurate. Shortly after the company’s head office in Calcutta extended the retirement age from fifty‑five to fifty‑eight years, subject to a medical examination at fifty‑five, the workmen at the Bombay branch demanded that their retirement age be extended from fifty‑five to sixty years. This demand gave rise to an industrial dispute which was referred to an Industrial Tribunal for resolution. The company opposed the claim but indicated willingness to introduce provisions in Bombay that were similar to those already adopted at the Calcutta head office. The Tribunal faced difficulty because earlier Supreme Court decisions had concluded that the prevailing trend in the Bombay region was to fix the retirement age at sixty years. Consequently, the Tribunal felt obliged to examine whether that earlier conclusion remained correct. After its enquiry the Tribunal persuaded itself that no such trend existed in fact and therefore ordered that the retirement age in Bombay should be fifty‑eight years. The Supreme Court, after a careful review of all material placed on record, found no justification for doubting the correctness of its earlier pronouncement. The Court observed that the Tribunal’s approach to this aspect of the problem was not commendable and that its present conclusion—that an earlier pronouncement confirmed by this Court was inaccurate—was fundamentally unsound. The Court explained that a revision of a judicial opinion on a specific trend requires strong, unambiguous evidence that covers the period both before and especially after the earlier finding was recorded. Moreover, the documents placed on record demonstrated a consistent trend in the Bombay region to fix the retirement age of clerical and subordinate staff at sixty years, as reflected in the authorities cited, namely Imperial Chemical Industries (India) Private Ltd. v. Their Workmen, [1961] 2 S.C.R. 349 and Dunlop Rubber Co. Ltd. v. Workmen, [1960] 2 S.C.R. 51. The judgment was delivered in the civil appellate jurisdiction concerning Civil Appeal No. 513 of 1963, which was an appeal by special leave from the award dated December 1961 of the Maharashtra Industrial Tribunal.

In the matter referred to as Reference (I.T.) No 48 of 1961 before the Maharashtra Industrial Tribunal, the parties were represented by counsel. Counsel for the appellants comprised the Additional Solicitor‑General together with additional legal representatives, while counsel for respondent No 1 appeared on behalf of the opposing side. The judgment concerning the appeal was pronounced on 24 March 1964 by Justice Das Gupta. The appeal arose from an industrial dispute concerning the appropriate age at which employees should be compulsorily retired.

The first respondent, Shaw Wallace & Co., was originally incorporated in January 1946 as a private limited company to succeed the partnership firm that had conducted business in India for approximately six decades. In July 1947 the private limited company was converted into a public limited company. Its head office was situated in Calcutta and it maintained branch offices in Bombay, Delhi and Madras. Historically, the company's general practice at both its head office and its branches was to retire employees at the age of fifty‑five, although on a case‑by‑case basis the company sometimes exercised its discretion to permit certain employees to continue service beyond that age. In September 1959 the company entered into an agreement with its Calcutta employees which extended the retirement age to fifty‑eight, provided that each employee passed a medical examination upon attaining the age of fifty‑five. Soon after the Calcutta agreement, the company's employees in Bombay raised a grievance asserting that no workman should be retired before completing sixty years of age. The dispute was referred to the Maharashtra Industrial Tribunal. Before the tribunal the company opposed the claim of the Bombay workmen, but offered to adopt for its Bombay employees provisions similar to those already agreed with the Calcutta workforce – namely, retirement at fifty‑eight subject to a medical examination at fifty‑five. The tribunal directed that the compulsory retirement age should be set at fifty‑eight, while allowing the company, at its discretion and with either express or implied consent of the individual employee, to retain an employee beyond that age. The workmen appealed against that decision. The court noted that there was no longer any dispute that the compulsory retirement age should not remain at fifty‑five; the remaining question was whether the age should be fixed at fifty‑eight or at sixty. In examining this issue, the court referred to data collected by the Pay Commission (1957‑59) concerning pensionable ages under various pension insurance schemes and social assistance programmes in forty‑eight countries as of 1954. The data indicated that the pensionable age was seventy in two countries, sixty‑seven in another two, sixty‑five in twenty‑four, sixty in seventeen, fifty‑five in two and fifty in one, illustrating the range of ages applied internationally.

The report of the Pay Commission indicated that, out of the forty‑eight countries for which data were available, forty‑five had set the pensionable age at sixty years or higher. The Commission observed that this pattern was especially striking because those countries varied greatly in terms of demographic makeup, economic development, climate and social conditions. It further noted that there seemed to be a near‑universal professional opinion that, after weighing physiological, economic and social considerations, the normal span of employment should extend at least to the age of sixty and could reasonably continue to sixty‑five years.

For the purpose of the present dispute, the Commission stressed that it was more beneficial and indeed necessary to examine the trends within India, and particularly within the industrial region that gave rise to the controversy. The Commission recognised that balancing the needs of employees with the interests of employers, and more broadly with the overall interests of the country, required industrial adjudication to give careful attention to the prevailing practices of the specific industrial locality.

The Commission explained that when workers in a particular region succeed in obtaining a retirement age of sixty, that success is likely to generate comparable expectations among other workers in the same region. Denying similar relief to those workers could create dissatisfaction, and it is the purpose of industrial adjudication to avoid such discontent. Consequently, tribunals dealing with questions of retirement age, working hours and related matters give great weight to what has been done recently in neighboring industrial establishments, whether such actions were the result of agreements or of adjudication.

In support of their request to set the retirement age at sixty, the workmen presented evidence that, in recent years, there was a clear tendency in comparable concerns within the Bombay region to adopt a retirement age of sixty. Exhibit U‑5 listed fifty concerns where the retirement age was sixty; several of those concerns had fixed that age as early as 1950, while the remainder had done so between 1952 and 1961. The workmen argued that this evidence demonstrated a regional trend toward a sixty‑year retirement age.

The workmen also highlighted certain Supreme Court decisions that reflected this trend. In Imperial Chemical Industries (India) Private Ltd. v. The Workmen, the Tribunal had raised the retirement age from fifty‑five to fifty‑eight and both parties appealed. The Court remarked that a document on the record “would conclusively show that in Bombay the age of retirement is almost invariably fixed at 60 and not at 55.” In an earlier case, Dunzlop Rubber Co. Ltd. v. Workmen, it had been submitted that the employer was an

In this case, the Court observed that the respondent was an All India concern and that altering the terms and conditions of service with respect to the retirement age in one establishment could upset the uniformity that existed across its various branches and might produce serious consequences elsewhere. The Court recognised that this consideration was relevant, but stated that its effect had to be assessed together with other material facts and circumstances. An important material factor, according to the Court, was the observation that the retirement age could, and frequently did, vary according to the particular industry and the region in which a concern operated. The Court then noted that the Tribunal had examined the awards issued in recent times in a number of concerns situated in the Bombay region and had found a prevailing tendency to fix the retirement age at sixty years. Relying principally on this finding of the Tribunal, the Court declined to set aside the award that fixed the retirement age at sixty years. The Court further pointed out that the correctness of the Tribunal’s finding—that the recent awards in the Bombay region showed a trend of fixing the retirement age at sixty—had not been contested before the Court.

The Court further examined the respondent’s attempt to demonstrate that it was inaccurate to claim a regional trend of fixing the retirement age at sixty. To support this argument, the respondent relied on a document identified as Chart Ex. Cl. The Court explained that the respondent had written to the Bombay Chamber of Commerce seeking information from its member concerns about the retirement ages observed by them, and that the information obtained from some of those members had been incorporated into the Chart. The workmen objected to the admission of the Chart on the basis that the original letters had not been produced in the record. However, the Court observed that there was no serious dispute that the Chart faithfully reproduced the information supplied by the various concerns named therein, and therefore the Tribunal was correct in rejecting the workmen’s objection. The Chart listed the retirement ages of seventy‑five concerns; in the majority of cases the retirement age was shown as fifty‑five, and in a few cases as fifty‑eight. At first glance this appeared to provide strong (1) [1961] 2 S.C.R. 349. (2) [1960] 2 S.C.R. 51. testimony against the workmen’s case that the recent trend in Bombay had been to fix the retirement age at sixty. Yet, on closer examination, the Court found that the document offered little assistance in determining the recent trend because it gave no indication of when the retirement ages of fifty‑five or fifty‑eight had been fixed in those concerns. Moreover, a statement filed by the workmen indicated that in two of the listed concerns—Ingerzoll Band and Northern Assurance Co.—the demand for fixing the retirement age at sixty was still under negotiation. Consequently, the Court concluded that the Chart did not convincingly rebut the Tribunal’s finding of a regional trend toward a retirement age of sixty years.

In this case, the Tribunal observed that the demand for fixing the retirement age at sixty years was still under negotiation. Exhibit U‑6, which the Tribunal examined, demonstrated that in twenty‑five of the listed concerns the clerical and subordinate employees were not organised into trade unions. From this observation, the Tribunal inferred that the reasons why those particular concerns retained a retirement age of fifty‑five or fifty‑eight years were specific to each concern and could not be treated as evidence of a general recent trend. In spite of these infirmities, the document identified as Exhibit Cl appeared to have impressed the Tribunal.

The Court noted that the principal difficulty in accepting the Company’s case on this point lay in the pronouncements previously made by this Court. Accordingly, the Tribunal considered it to be its duty to inquire whether the conclusion recorded by this Court in some of its earlier decisions, regarding the relevant trend in the Bombay region, was accurate. Having embarked on this enquiry, the Tribunal apparently took considerable pains to perform the task and ultimately persuaded itself that no such trend was established in fact.

The Court added that the approach adopted by the Tribunal in dealing with this aspect of the problem was not very commendable. The Tribunal’s present conclusion, that what it had said on an earlier occasion and which was confirmed by this Court on appeal, was in fact inaccurate, was, in the Court’s view, largely unsound. The Court stated that, had it erred in making those pronouncements, it would be the first to admit such mistakes and to correct the error.

After careful consideration of all the material placed on the record, the Court found nothing to justify any doubt about the correctness of what was said on the earlier occasion. On the contrary, the awards and agreements concerning the question of age of retirement, as reflected in the several documents on the record, clearly showed a consistent trend in the Bombay region to fix the retirement age of clerical and subordinate staff at sixty years. The very few departures from this practice that the Tribunal mentioned were, in the Court’s opinion, wholly insufficient to indicate any slowing down of this trend.

The Court observed that the Tribunal had failed to notice that instances which might justify a revision of the judicial opinion expressed on an earlier occasion about a particular trend must be strong, unambiguous, and must speak for the period both before and, more particularly, after the previous finding had been recorded. The Court also directed attention to the Report of the Norms Committee, which expressed the following opinion: “After taking into consideration the views of the earlier Committees and Commissions including those of the Second Pay Commission the report of which has been released recently, we feel that the retirement age for workmen in all industries should be fixed at 60. Accordingly, the norm for retirement age is fixed at 60”. This considered opinion of a Committee, on which both employers and employees were represented, emphasized the prevailing consensus.

The judgment observed that, at least in the Bombay region, there existed a general consensus that the retirement age for workmen should be fixed at sixty years. The Tribunal had mentioned these observations but had dismissed them without providing a satisfactory reason, a course of action the Court found to be unwarranted. After reviewing all the oral testimonies and documentary materials placed in the record, the Court examined the entirety of the facts and circumstances presented. The Court concluded that, in order to align with the prevailing regional view, the appropriate retirement age for the appellant workmen must be fixed at sixty years. Consequently, the Court allowed the appeal, awarded costs to the appellant, and altered the Tribunal’s award so that the retirement age for all workmen of the respondent is fixed at sixty years. The final order therefore confirmed that the retirement age for the workmen covered by the dispute is fixed at sixty years, and the appeal was granted. The Court also noted that the recommendation of the Norms Committee, which had been cited earlier, supported fixing the retirement age at sixty, reinforcing the regional consensus. By setting the retirement age uniformly at sixty, the Court aimed to ensure consistency across the industry and to prevent arbitrary variations in employment conditions.