New Delhi: The Supreme Court Wednesday dismissed the plea by Ananda Bazar Patrika and other newspaper establishments seeking the recall of its verdict upholding the validity of the Majithia wage board for the working journalists and newspaper employees.
“We have carefully gone through the review petitions and the connected papers. We find no merit in the review petitions and the same are accordingly dismissed,” said a bench of Chief Justice P. Sathasivam, Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Shiva Kirti Singh after considering the review petition in their chamber.
The court earlier in the morning declined the plea for holding the hearing of the review plea in the open court.
The petitioners, newspaper organisation, had sought the review of the Feb 7, verdict of the court which said” “We hold that the recommendations of the Wage Boards are valid in law, based on genuine and acceptable considerations and there is no valid ground for interference under article 32” of the constitution.
While addressing the challenge to the constitutional validity of the Working Journalist Act, the court had said: “We are of the opinion that the challenge as to the vires of the act on the premise of it being ultra vires the constitution and violative of fundamental rights is wholly unfounded, baseless and completely untenable.”
Having upheld the act’s constitutional validity, the apex court had directed that the wages as revised/determined shall be payable from Nov 11, 2011 when the government notified the recommendations of the Majithia Wage Boards.
“All the arrears up to March 2014 shall be paid to all eligible persons in four equal instalments within a period of one year from today and continue to pay the revised wages from April 2014 onwards,” the court said in its order.
Upholding the legitimacy of the proceedings of the wage board, the court Feb 7 said: ” After having exhaustively gone through the record of proceedings and various written communications, we are fully satisfied that the Wage Boards proceedings had been conducted and carried out in a legitimate approach and no decision of the Wage Board is perceived to having been taken unilaterally or arbitrarily.”
The court had also held as “not correct” the newspaper establishments contention that wage board copied the Sixth Pay Commission blindly.