The Supreme Court has held that a State Government's power under Section 17(2) of the Working Journalists and Other Newspaper Employees (Conditions of Service) and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1955, to refer a dues dispute to a Labour Court cannot be delegated to a subordinate authority, even though Section 17(1) of the same statute expressly permits delegation of the State's recovery-certificate function.
The appellants, a group of newspaper employees and journalists associated with the Dainik Bhaskar Group (D.B. Corp. Ltd.), had sought recovery of unpaid dues before Labour Courts in Maharashtra. The references to the Labour Courts in the underlying proceedings had been made not by the State Government itself but by Additional and Deputy Commissioners of Labour, acting pursuant to a 2016 notification of the Industries, Energy and Labour Department, Government of Maharashtra, which purported to delegate the State's Section 17(2) referral function to those officers.
The Supreme Court held that a comparative reading of the two sub-sections of Section 17 shows that Parliament expressly provided for delegation in sub-section (1), covering the issuance of a recovery certificate, but included no corresponding delegation clause in sub-section (2), which governs the reference of a dispute to adjudication. Applying the interpretive principle that the express inclusion of a power in one provision, and its omission from a related provision, signals that the omission was deliberate, the Court held that the reference function under Section 17(2) remains one that only the State Government itself may exercise, and cannot be validly delegated to a Commissioner or Deputy Commissioner of Labour by executive notification.
Readers should note that published case reports describe the core holding consistently, but a precise reading of how the Court has treated the resulting references already made on the strength of the 2016 Maharashtra notification, and any directions on fresh references, should be confirmed against the full text of the judgment rather than secondary summaries.