The requirement of Section 25f(b) of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, is a condition precedent to the retrenchment and where the compensation money has not been paid prior to the time of retrenchment, the retrenchment becomes invalid and inoperative.

( 1 ) THE Petitioner's case, in this petition under Article 226, is that owing to a diminution in the business of the Oriental Electrical and Engineering Co. , of which the Petitioner company is the Managing Agent, the Petitioner, in June 1958, retrenched some 16 employees, including Respondents 3 to 17 (hereinafter referred to as 'the workmen'), after complying with the requirements of Section 25f of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 (hereinafter referred to as 'the Act'), and the workmen received final settlement of their dues under receipts granted in Ex. A series. Notwithstanding this fact and the further fact that two of the workmen, namely, Respondents 4 and 5 accepted permanent employment under another employer, the State Government, in December, 1958, referred the industrial dispute alleged to have arisen between the petitioner and the workmen for adjudication to the Fifth Industrial Tribunal (Respondent No. 1 ). The Tribunal gave its award (Ex. E) on the 27th June, 1963, holding that: (a) Instead of P. B. Mukherjee (Respondent No. 13), one A. Das should have been retrenched; so that Mukherjee should be reinstated with 50% of his ordinary wages for the period of his forced unemployment; (b) The retrenchment of all the other workmen was justified; nevertheless, they should be paid another month's wages in addition to the amounts already paid by the petitioner.

( 2 ) THE Award is challenged by the Petitioner, on both the points, as being vitiated by want of jurisdiction and error apparent on the face of the record. (a) As regards P. B. Mukherjee, the Tribunal's finding is that Sri Das Gupta, being junior to Mukherjee, should have been retrenched instead of Mukherjee, according to the principle "last come, first go", embodied in Section 25g of the Act, as follows:"25g. Where any workman in an industrial establishment, who is a citizen of India, is to be retrenched and he belongs to a particular category of workmen in that establishment, in the absence of any agreement between the employer and the workman in this behalf, the employer shall ordinarily retrench the workman who was the last person to be employed in that category, unless for reasons to be recorded the employer retrenches any other workman. "

( 3 ) THE petitioner's case is that these two workmen do not belong to "the same category of workmen" as required by the section and that, accordingly, the Award is vitiated by an error of law apparent on the face of the record in view of the Tribunal's finding that Mukherjee was an accounts clerk and Das Gupta was a store-keeper. The Tribunal, however, took the view that both posts involved clerical work and neither involved any technical skill or training, so as to constitute a separate category. This finding, instead of being undermined, is strengthened by the averment in para. 11 of the petition that on the eve of the retrenchment Mukherjee was employed as "stock clerk" and Das Gupta as "store-keeper",

( 4 ) THE petitioner has failed to produce any materials from which it could be inferred that the man working as stock clerk could not act as 'store-keeper* or vice versa. The difference, if any, is only in nomenclature. As observed by the Supreme Court in J. K. Iron and Steel Co. v. Its Workmen, they "are parts of one whole department". The Supreme Court, in that case, refused to hold that the Workshop Department and the Punch and Pressing Department of a factory belonged to two different categories. In the instant case, the function of both the stock-keeper and the store-keeper is clerical and neither requires any technical skill or training, as the Tribunal has found. In that view, the following observations of the Supreme Court in the cited case, answer the petitioner's contention on the present point: "clerks are not specifically trained to handle only a particular kind of work. Their work is easily convertible and one can replace another without any dislocation in the department".

( 5 ) IN the instan