“Part-time temporary employees at a government-run institution cannot claim parity in wage with regular employees on the premise of equal pay for equal work,” the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. (Indian Union vs. Ilmo Devi).
Part-time employees are not eligible to seek regularisation, according to Justices MR Shah and AS Bopanna, because they are not working against any sanctioned post and there can be no permanent continuation of part-time temporary employees.
The top court also stated that regularisation can only be done in accordance with the State’s/regularization government’s policy and that no one can claim regularisation as a matter of right if the regularisation policy is not followed.
In this case, the Court found that the respondents were not entitled to regularisation under the June 2014 regularisation policy due to the lack of any sanctioned post and the fact that they were serving as contingent paid part-time Safai Karamcharies.
The petitioners were challenging a judgement of the Punjab and Haryana High Court that overturned a CAT order.
The CAT had ordered the central government to revisit the entire problem, finish the effort to reformulate their regularization/absorption policy and decide on a gradual approach to sanctioning the postings.
The Supreme Court stated that the High Court cannot direct the government and/or its departments to formulate a specific regularisation policy in the exercise of its powers under Article 226 of the Constitution.
The High Court had ordered that people who had completed 20 years of part-time daily wage service be given minimum basic pay for Group ‘D’ posts as of a certain date.
Despite the fact that the Supreme Court noted that this trend is unsustainable because part-time workers who work four to five hours a day cannot claim parity with other Group ‘D’ positions, the Court decided not to overturn it.
This was in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling dated July 22, 2016, when it issued a notice in the current appeals, in which it stated that it is not inclined to interfere with the High Court’s directives in paragraph 23 and that they should be followed.
