' The above captioned revision gives information that the order, dated 21-3-1984 passed by the Presiding Officer, Punjab Labour Court No,2, Lahore, in his appellate jurisdiction under section 17 of the Payment of Wages Act, is null, void and without jurisdiction.
2. The petitioner and two others brought applications under section 15 to the Authority under the Payment Wages Act for the recovery of deducted wages. The Authority consolidated the three applications and disposed them of by a single order allowing deducted wages. So far as the petitioner is concerned, he was allowed one time's compensation also. On appeal by the respondent the learned lower appellate Court disallowed one time's compensation to the petitioner, hence this revision.
3. The provision of consolidating various petitions is given in section 16. There are two requirements for the application of the section. One is that the persons claiming deducted wages should belong to the same establishment and the other is that the wage-period should be the same. If these conditions are fulfilled and the said persons are belonging to the same unpaid group, section 16 applies. The other provision of section 16 is that in such cases compensation of Rs,10 per head only can be allowed.
4. It has been argued that section 16 was not attracted, therefore, consolidation of the cases had no effect of disallowing compensation to the petitioner. It is said that wage-period is not the same as deducted wages are not of the same months in all the three cases. This argument has no force.
Wage-period is explained in section 5. It envisages that wages should be paid within seven days and in some cases within 10 days after the last days of wage-period. It means, for example, if the wage-period ends on 30th, wages should be paid upto the 7th of the next month. If the wage- period is upto 15th, the wages should be paid upto 22nd day of the same month. The statements of the deducted wages produced in all the three cases show that the wage-period in all cases was end of calendar month and was the same. In no case the time of wage-period is given as 15th or any other date. The whole B calendar month is mentioned, meaning thereby that the last day of the wage-period in all the cases was the last day of the calendar month concerned. Since all the three persons belonged to the same establishment and wage-period was the same, so they belonged to the same unpaid group and section 16 was rightly applied by the learned Authority but it wrongly against the provisions of section 16 allowed one time's compensation. It could allow only Rs,10 to the petitioner.
5. As a result the revision is partly accepted and modifying the impugned order of the learned lower appellate Court, the petitioner is allowed Rs,10 as compensation.