SC has rejected right to strike since 1962

Manoj Mitta / TNN / Feb 2, 2006, 02:22 IST

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The ongoing strike against modernisation of airports falls foul of a string of SC judgments dating back to 1962.

SC has rejected right to strike since 1962

NEW DELHI: The ongoing strike against modernisation of airports falls foul of a string of Supreme Court judgments dating back to 1962. The highest court of the land has consistently held that nobody could claim to have a fundamental right to strike.
The court ruled that even political parties could not claim such a right. Incidentally, it said so on a petition filed by CPM, which is openly backing the current strike by airport employees.
"No political party or organisation can claim that it is entitled to paralyse industry and commerce in the entire state or nation and is entitled to prevent the citizens not in sympathy with its viewpoints, from exercising their fundamental rights or from performing their duties for their own benefit or for the benefit of the state or the nation," the Supreme Court observed in 1998, while dismissing the CPM��s appeal against a Kerala High Court judgment.
The apex court has repeatedly repelled efforts to seek a constitutional cover for strike: The first such verdict came in a 1962 case, Kameshwar Prasad vs State of Bihar, in which SC upheld a rule prohibiting strikes. It said the rule "cannot be struck down as there is no fundamental right to resort to a strike."

At the same time, the court struck down another rule forbidding employees to hold even demonstrations. A ban on demonstrations, it said, violated the fundamental right to "freedom of speech and expression" as well as to "assemble peaceably."
In another ruling in 1962, All India Bank Employees Association vs National Industrial Tribunal, the court said that "even a very liberal interpretation" of the fundamental right to form trade union cannot lead to a conclusion that they have a "guaranteed right to an effective collective bargaining or to strike, either as part of collective bargaining or otherwise."

In a 1964 case, Radhey Shyam Sharma vs the Post Master General, SC upheld the penalty imposed on an employee for participating in a demonstration "in furtherance of a strike" even after the invocation of Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA).
In the 1998 case, CPI(M) vs Bharat Kumar, SC said: "There cannot be any doubt that the fundamental rights of the people as a whole cannot be subservient to the claim of fundamental right of an individual or only a section of the people."
Three years ago, SC famously summed up the law on strike while upholding the Jayalalithaa government��s tough action against 1.70 lakh employees who had gone on strike for three weeks despite the invocation of ESMA.
The court said (a) there is no fundamental right to go on strike, (b) there is no legal/statutory right to go on strike and (c) there is no moral or equitable justification to go on strike. It added that "strike as a weapon is mostly misused."

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