GOVERNMENT’S POLICY TOWARDS LABOUR 151
the Ordinance to the employer to prosecute the employee was harassment of the labourer. I readily accepted the point and I remember we issued an amendment to the Ordinance to remove the power from the hands of the employer and to hand it to the Crown Prosecutors.
Sir, as I said, I cannot deal exhaustively with these matters but I could sum up the whole situation by saying this, that when I examine the wartime legislation of the Government of India, which undoubtedly has the effect of restricting the liberty of labour, I think two new principles have emerged from it. The first is this : that the Government of India for the first time has taken upon itself the responsibility which it never did before of fixing the conditions on which a labourer may be employed. I think this is altogether a new principle which had no place in our labour legislation so far, and I am sure that this principle which has found its place in wartime legislation will be given a permanent place in the labour legislation of this country.
The second important principle which this wartime labour legislation contains is the principle of compulsory arbitration. Sir, I think my friends, Mr. Joshi and Mr. Jamnadas Mehta, will allow me to say that I have some personal experience of labour. I have known and seen the wasting efforts that labourers have made by going on strike in order to obtain certain advantages from their employers, and I think I can say without exaggerating the matter that I know hardly of a case where the workers, after a long, arduous, painful, wasting struggle, extending over months together, had ultimately to surrender to the employers and go back on their old conditions or conditions much deteriorated.
Sir, the provision contained in Rule 81 of the Defence of India Rules, which gives the Government the power of compulsory arbitration, has been to my mind a matter of the greatest benefit to labour.
There are very few cases, so far as I know, where this power, when it has been adopted, has not given labour what it was struggling to get. There are very few strikes, so far as I know, which have not ended successfully in favour of labour. The complaint which Mr. Joshi makes with regard to the provision contained in section 81 is that we had not employed Rule 81 in each and every case. His contention, so far as I have been able to find out, is that Government is not willing always and in every case, where labour has raised a dispute, to apply this section.