'Industrial Dispute', and the Individual Dispute

In one line

An industrial dispute is a real quarrel about employment, or its terms, or working conditions, between employers and workers or between either group among themselves, and it now also covers a single worker's own dispute about being dismissed, discharged, retrenched or terminated.

In exam wording: section 2(q) of the Industrial Relations Code 2020 defines "industrial dispute" as any dispute or difference between employers and employers, or between employers and workers, or between workers and workers, which is connected with the employment or non-employment or the terms of employment or with the conditions of labour of any person, and includes any dispute or difference between an individual worker and an employer connected with, or arising out of, the discharge, dismissal, retrenchment or termination of such worker.

Why the law has this at all

The last chapter decided where the Code applies. This one decides what it applies to.

Almost every machine in the Code is switched on by an industrial dispute. Conciliation under section 43 is conciliation of an industrial dispute. The Tribunal under section 44 adjudicates industrial disputes. The immunity in section 16, which Module I worked, protects acts done in contemplation or furtherance of an industrial dispute. A strike is defined by reference to the industrial context. So a quarrel that is not an industrial dispute cannot be taken to any of the Code's forums, and the parties are left to the ordinary law.

Two opposite dangers had to be met.

If the definition is too narrow, the Act misses its own purpose. A dispute is industrial in substance even where the individual affected is not the person raising it, because a union exists precisely to take up its members' causes collectively.

If it is too wide, it swallows everything. The old section 2(k) spoke of a dispute connected with the employment of "any person". Taken literally, workmen could raise an industrial dispute about a complete stranger, and the employer would be dragged before a Tribunal over somebody he had nothing to do with.

Section 2(q) meets the first danger by covering disputes between all three combinations of parties. The second is met by the courts, which read "any person" down, and by the Code, which added a second limb so that the commonest individual case does not have to be squeezed through the first.

Some words this chapter uses

Dispute or difference is a real, existing disagreement. It is not a grievance nobody has raised, and not a mere demand that has never been rejected.

Employment or non-employment covers both the terms on which a person is employed and the fact of his not being employed, which is how a dismissal comes within the definition.