The Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 1946

What it does

The Act requires employers in industrial establishments to define the conditions of service of their workmen in writing, in standing orders, and to have those orders certified. The purpose is certainty: a workman should know the terms on which he is employed, and the employer should not be able to change them without following the Act.

The matters the standing orders deal with are set out in a Schedule to the Act and include the classification of workmen, the manner of notifying hours of work and shifts, attendance and late coming, leave and holidays, the termination of employment and the notice for it, suspension and dismissal for misconduct, and the means of redress for the workman. An employer submits a draft to the Certifying Officer, the workmen or their union are heard, and the Certifying Officer certifies the orders. The Act also provides for model standing orders, which apply where an establishment has no certified orders of its own.

Once certified, the standing orders bind both sides. They can be modified only through the procedure the Act provides, and a term of employment that conflicts with them is unenforceable to that extent. The Act also gives the labour authorities power to decide questions about the meaning of the orders.

Who it binds

Industrial establishments that employ the number of workmen the Act, or the State's amendment, specifies. The central Act set the threshold at one hundred workmen, and some States have lowered it, so that the threshold depends on the State in which the establishment is located. An employer below the threshold is outside the Act but may still have a policy that serves the same purpose.

What has changed, and when

The Industrial Relations Code, 2020 was enacted to subsume this Act, and it provides for standing orders for establishments above a threshold of its own. Whether the Act or the Code governs a particular question depends on the commencement of the Code's provisions, and the matter is judged under the Act for the period before the Code applied. This page describes the Act as the instrument that governed standing orders and does not state the date from which the Code replaced it.

What turns on it in practice

The standing orders are where a disciplinary case is won or lost. A dismissal for misconduct has to follow the procedure in the certified orders, which usually means a charge sheet, a domestic enquiry and a reasoned decision. An employer that skips a step, or relies on an act of misconduct that the orders do not list, will find that the dismissal is set aside for want of procedure however plain the facts.

The second point is the difference between certified and uncertified terms. An employment contract or handbook that adds a rule the standing orders do not contain is open to challenge by the workman, and a company that has grown past the threshold without submitting draft orders is in default of the Act. That default is found in diligence, and the firm's employment work checks whether the establishment is covered and, if it is, whether its orders are certified.

The third is the interplay with the other employment statutes. The Act sits with the law on notification of vacancies and the law on construction workers' welfare among the instruments that the firm's employment practice names for an employer, and it is the one that most often reaches a courtroom, through a challenge to a dismissal.