Industrial Relations Machinery in Maharashtra There is a statutory conciliation machinery in the state to settle actual and/or apprehended industrial

disputes both under the Industrial Disputes Act and the Bombay Industrial Relations Act. In addition, there is a special service called Personnel Management Advisory Service Scheme (PMAS), which has been in existence for a long time. The PMAS is informal mediation machinery and deals with disputes as well as strikes and lockouts, which cannot normally be processed by the Statutory conciliation Machinery (sic) (OCL 2006:p.2). The officers under the Scheme seek to bring awareness among the contesting parties regarding their rights and obligations under the various labour laws, agreements, settlements, awards, etc. and make suitable recommendations to them for resolving their disputes. The advice offered is purely informal in nature. We evaluate the performance of both the machineries here.

Source: Office of the Commissioner of Labour, Mumbai. The disposal rate of disputes by the conciliation machinery (i.e. disputes resulting in settlement as a proportion of number of disputes handled in a year) fluctuated for a few years and started its downward slide from 1999-2000. While the number of disputes handled has remained constant in the region of 6,000-7,000 in a year, the number of settled cases declined considerably over the years.

Source: Office of the Commissioner of Labour, Mumbai. ILO Office for South Asia, New Delhi 65The PMAS had a poor record since 1999-2000. It is learnt that parties to a dispute prefer direct negotiations (collective bargaining) to conciliation. 6.5 Methods of Settlement of Work Stoppages in India The Labour Bureau classifies the methods of settlement into four major categories government intervention (mediation or conciliation and adjudication), mutual settlement (direct negotiation, arbitration), voluntary resumption (by employers or employees), and others. There are several work stoppages each year for which information is not known; we exclude this from the total.

Note: * The percentage distribution for 2001-2004 (excluding 2002) is 42.7, 58.5,25.8, and 3.0 respectively. The year 2004 seems to be an unusual year in which about 70 per cent of work stoppages were settled by government intervention. Source: As in Table

Voluntary resumption was a dominant method in 1995-97, but its relative importance declined considerably and in recent years it accounted for only 28 per cent of work stoppages settled. Mutual settlement (mostly by direct negotiations) is emerging to be a significant method of settlement over the years, though government intervention is still inevitable. 6.6 Working of Industrial and Labour Courts Employers and trade unions also fight their battle in the courts. Litigation is both complementary and an alternative to mechanisms like work stoppages. The resort to litigation is higher where there are more laws and in cases where issues are subject to legal decisions like legality or illegality of strikes, recognition of unions or verification of allegations of unfair labour practice by either employer or workers. The state government has increased the number of Industrial and Labour Courts over the years (Table 6.9). Table 6.9: Number of labour and industrial courts, 1975-2000

Source: for 1975, 1992-2000, Srinivasan Committee (2002, Appendix IV); for other years, Office of the Industrial Court, Mumbai (official communication).