SC: Journalists’ Wage Wins Undone by an Illegal Shortcut

Case: Sudhir & Ors. v. Head of Human Resource, Dainik Bhaskar Group (D.B. Corp. Ltd.) & Ors., with connected appeals
Supreme Court of India
Justices Dipankar Datta and Sheel Nagu
Decided: August 11, 2026
Citation: 2026 INSC 834

Journalists across Maharashtra who felt they were owed unpaid wages had a simple path for years: file a complaint, and if there was a dispute over the amount, a Labour Commissioner could send the case straight to a Labour Court. Turns out that shortcut wasn’t legal. The Supreme Court has now said only the state government itself could do that — not any official it appointed to help.

What Happened
A group of employees, including a man named Sudhir, had won cases against their employers — Dainik Bhaskar and All India Reporter Pvt. Ltd. — in the Labour Court. But the Bombay High Court later threw out those wins. Why? Because the cases had never been properly sent (“referred”) to the Labour Court in the first place. Back in 2016, the Maharashtra government had issued an order letting certain Labour Commissioners handle these referrals on its behalf. The High Court said that wasn’t allowed. The employees and journalist unions appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Law in Simple Terms
The law that covers this — the Working Journalists Act, 1955 — sets out three steps for recovering unpaid wages:

1. The employee complains to the state government that they haven’t been paid.

2. If the employer disputes how much is owed, the government sends the dispute to a Labour Court to decide.

3. Once the Labour Court decides, the government helps recover the money.
Here’s the key detail: for step 1, the law clearly says the government can pass this job to another official. But for step 2 — actually sending the case to the Labour Court — the law says nothing about handing that job to anyone else.

The Supreme Court’s reasoning was simple: if the lawmakers wanted to allow a hand-off at step 2, they would have said so, just like they did for step 1. Since they didn’t, the Court read that as a deliberate choice — only the state government itself can send a case to the Labour Court. Nobody else, however senior, can do it on the government’s behalf. So Maharashtra’s 2016 order, which let Labour Commissioners do this job instead of the government, was not valid.

So What Happens to All the Cases Already Decided?
If the Court had simply said “all those referrals were invalid,” it would have wiped out years of Labour Court decisions and thrown thousands of ongoing cases into chaos.
Instead, the Court used its special constitutional power (Article 142, which lets it do complete justice in a case) to find a middle path:
• The Maharashtra government now has to go back and personally check every single case that was referred by a Labour Commissioner instead of by the government itself.
• If the government looks at the case and agrees “yes, there really was a genuine dispute here,” it can approve the referral now, and the case picks up right where it left off.
• If the government decides there wasn’t really a dispute worth referring, the referral falls through — but the employee doesn’t lose their right to recover the money. They can still try to recover it through other means, and the clock for their time limit starts fresh from the government’s decision.
The government has six months to sort through all of this.

The clever part of this ruling is how the Court avoided a legal mess. Normally, when someone acts under a power they didn’t actually have, courts don’t allow that action to be “approved after the fact” (lawyers call this ratification) — especially when it comes to government powers created by a specific law. In fact, the Supreme Court reminded everyone of its own past ruling that says exactly this.
But here, the judges carved out an exception. They said this situation was actually better than a typical case needing after-the-fact approval, because the Labour Commissioners weren’t acting on their own — they were following a government order that looked completely legitimate at the time. Nobody knew it would later be struck down. So instead of punishing everyone for the government’s mistake, the Court told the government to double-check its own past decisions and fix what needs fixing, rather than starting from scratch.
One more interesting wrinkle: the old 1955 law itself has already been replaced by a newer law (the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020) as of November 2025. So this entire dispute is really about tidying up old cases under a law that no longer even exists for future disputes.

Citation: Sudhir & Ors. v. Head of Human Resource, Dainik Bhaskar Group (D.B. Corp. Ltd.) & Ors., 2026 INSC 834 (Supreme Court of India, decided August 11, 2026).