New Delhi, December 22
The Supreme Court has rejected the plea of the employees of Haryana State Cooperative Land Development Bank (HSCLDB) for parity of bonus with the employees of Primary Agricultural Cooperative Banks (PACBs) saying the payment of bonus depends upon the financial health of an institute.
Setting aside the Punjab and Haryana High Court judgement ordering the payment of the bonus at the same rate to the workers of the HSCLDB as was given to the primary banks, a Bench comprising Mr Justice Doraiswamy Raju and Mr Justice Arijit Pasayat said such parity was not possible when the bank was incurring losses.
The Bench said the high court order was “indefensible” because the documents placed on record about the financial position of the HSCLDB indicated that it was “presently incurring losses, and there is no allocable surplus.”
“That being the position, the documents in question do not help the employees of the HSCLDB in any event,” the apex court ruled.
The HSCLDB employees union had filed a petition in the high court for payment of equal bonus to them, which was resisted by the workers of the PACBs.
The high court had said the HSCLDB employees were entitled to the bonus at equal rates.
However, the HSCLDB management had challenged the order in the apex court on the ground that the high court had “lost sight” of the provisions of the Registrar of Cooperative Societies Act, which clearly stipulated that the minimum bonus was 8.33 per cent of the salary or wages earned by an employee during the accounting year if there was no surplus amount for that year with the employer bank.
The HSCLDB management had stated that it did not have surplus funds to pay higher bonus to its employees.
The employees of the PACBs had resisted payment of equal bonus to the employees of the HSCLDB on the ground that the former banks were “separate entities with separate balance sheet and have a distinct cooperative and corporate
identity.”
