Trade Unions in India: Definition, Registration, Recognition, and Immunity

The argument made in the first article of this series was that labour law exists to correct the inequality of bargaining power between worker and employer. The individual worker, as a single party to a standard-form contract of employment, cannot negotiate in any meaningful sense — she can accept, refuse, or exit, but she cannot set the terms. The trade union is the institutional form through which workers attempt to convert that individual weakness into collective strength. Without it, the structural asymmetry that private law masks as formal equality of contract remains exactly as Kahn-Freund described it: a legal fiction that entrenches industrial subordination.¹

That is why the Trade Unions Act, 1926 was not merely administrative legislation. It was a foundational settlement in the history of Indian industrial relations. Before it, organised labour action occupied a legally precarious position — potentially criminal by reason of conspiracy doctrine, potentially ruinous by reason of civil tort. The 1926 Act changed both of those conditions simultaneously. It took conduct that might otherwise have been treated as unlawful combination and brought it within a legal structure. It did so not out of sentiment, but because unlegislated industrial conflict produces worse outcomes for everyone: episodic violence, criminal prosecutions of organisers, injunctions suppressing collective action before it can even begin, and the permanent marginalisation of workers’ voice in the processes that determine their working lives.¹²

The most important part of the Act is not registration in the administrative sense. It is what registration unlocks. A registered trade union becomes a legal person, capable of holding property and suing in its own name. More importantly, registration activates the criminal immunity of Section 17 and the civil immunity of Section 18 — the two provisions that create the minimum legal space in which collective bargaining, strike pressure, and organised industrial action can exist without collapsing into criminal prosecution or tortious liability. Everything else in the statute is built on that foundation.¹

I. The Definition of a Trade Union — Section 2(h)

Section 2(h) of the Trade Unions Act, 1926 defines a trade union as any combination, whether temporary or permanent, formed primarily for the purpose of regulating the relations between workmen and employers, or between workmen and workmen, or between employers and employers, or for imposing restrictive conditions on the conduct of any trade or business, and includes any federation of two or more trade unions.¹

Every element of that definition was carefully constructed and has been interpreted broadly by the courts. Understanding each element separately is essential before reading the definition as a whole.

“Any combination, whether temporary or permanent”

The Act does not insist on a formal institution, a written constitution, a permanent governing body, or even a registered name before a body can qualify as a trade union. The emphasis throughout is on association combined with purpose. A temporary combination formed for a single strike, without elaborate organisational infrastructure, falls within the definition if its primary purpose is regulation of relations in the statutory sense. What matters is the functional reality — what the body is doing and why — not its organisational form.¹

This deliberate breadth has doctrinal significance. The law’s protective logic attaches at the level of combinations and purposes, not merely at the level of highly institutionalised permanent bodies. Labour organisation in its early, informal stages is captured by the definition. This matters most when employers attempt to argue that newly formed or informally constituted bodies do not qualify. The statutory answer is that combination plus lawful purpose suffices.³

“Formed primarily for the purpose”

The Act does not require that regulating industrial relations be the exclusive purpose of the body. The test is primacy, not exclusivity. A trade union may maintain welfare funds, run educational schemes, publish journals, and engage in political activity alongside its representational function — all without losing its character as a trade union — provided its primary industrial purpose remains the regulation of the relations between workmen and employers.¹

Indian courts have consistently declined to strike down unions because they also serve welfare, social, or political functions. The primary-purpose test is applied with a practical recognition that unions in real life are multidimensional bodies. The union’s dominant identity must be representational, but its ancillary activities are not disqualifying.³

The three relational dyads

Section 2(h) covers relations between three possible combinations: workmen and employers, workmen and workmen, and employers and employers.

The first — workmen and employers — is the paradigm case, the classic vertical relationship of industrial employment. A union formed to negotiate wages, resist arbitrary dismissal, and press for better working conditions is the archetype.

The second — workmen and workmen — addresses horizontal labour relations. Demarcation disputes between craft unions, rival claims between categories of workers within the same establishment, disputes about the relative entitlements of skilled and unskilled workers — all of these involve workers in conflict with each other over workplace governance.¹

The third — employers and employers — is the most underappreciated element. The statute is not asymmetrically protective of only one side. A trade association of employers that fixes minimum wages for an industry, or agrees on uniform terms of employment, is technically a trade union under Section 2(h). This reflects a legislative recognition that the law of combination applies to organised economic power across the spectrum — not only to workers.¹³

“Imposing restrictive conditions on the conduct of any trade or business”

This clause extends the definition beyond the standard industrial employment relationship to cover combinations that regulate the economic conduct of an industry more broadly. A collective of transporters agreeing on minimum freight rates, or a group of traders agreeing on uniform pricing, may technically fall within the definition because they impose restrictive conditions on trade or business. The breadth of this clause reinforces the view that Section 2(h) is a statute about organised economic combination across a spectrum of productive activity.¹

The judicial scope of the definition

Indian courts have applied the definition expansively. Multi-employer unions operating across dozens of establishments, craft unions cutting across different sectors, general unions representing workers across heterogeneous employment contexts, and national federations — all have been treated as trade unions within Section 2(h). Courts have refused to force Indian labour organisation into a rigid single-employer or single-industry mould that does not reflect the diverse and fragmented reality of Indian industrial relations.⁴⁵

In The Tamil Nadu Non-Gazetted Government Officers’ Union, Madras v. Registrar of Trade Unions, the Madras High Court held that civil servants engaged in core sovereign governmental functions were not within the Trade Unions Act because their employment was not connected with “trade or business” in the statutory sense.³ This establishes a limit to the definition at the outer boundary: pure sovereign administration, disconnected from any productivist or service-rendering function, falls outside the scope of the Act. The nexus with trade, industry, or organised economic activity must exist.³

From a Kahn-Freund perspective, the breadth of the definition is not a jurisprudential accident. The counterweight of labour must be allowed to organise in whatever form workers themselves find effective. A narrow definition would funnel industrial combination through a definitional bottleneck that serves only employers — preventing new forms of organisation from qualifying before they can be tested in practice. The broad definition gives the concept of the trade union the adaptive quality that actual industrial organisation requires as economic structures change.¹⁴

II. Registration: From Factual Combination to Legal Personality

Why registration matters structurally

Registration performs two distinct functions in the 1926 Act. The first is institutional: it converts a factual combination into a legal person, capable of exercising rights and incurring obligations independently of its individual members. The second is protective: it activates the criminal and civil immunities of Sections 17 and 18, which are available only to registered trade unions and their members.

Both functions are essential. Without legal personality, union property belongs to whoever holds it physically, union proceedings require cumbersome representative suits, and the union dissolves legally whenever leadership changes. Without the immunities, strike calls are potential criminal conspiracies and every industrial action is a potential civil wrong. Registration resolves both problems simultaneously.¹

The application process — Sections 4 to 7

Section 4(1) provides that any seven or more members of a trade union may apply for registration.¹ The significance of this threshold becomes clear when the alternative is considered. A threshold requiring a majority of the workforce, or a minimum of several hundred workers, would give employers a simple counter-strategy: discharge the organising workers before a registrable number is reached. The seven-member threshold democratises union formation at precisely the stage where it is most vulnerable — the moment of first attempt.

Section 3 establishes a Registrar of Trade Unions for each State, and Section 5 requires the application to be submitted to that Registrar with a copy of the union’s rules, the address of its head office, and particulars of office-bearers and members.¹ The Registrar system is State-level and decentralised.

Section 6 specifies the mandatory contents of the rules: the name of the union, the objects for which it is established, the purposes to which the general funds may be applied, provisions for the admission and expulsion of members, provisions for the appointment and removal of office-bearers, and provisions for the safe custody, audit, and inspection of accounts.¹

The rules requirement is not bureaucratic formality. It performs a constitutional function within the internal life of the union. It forces the definition of purpose — which determines the scope of the immunities under Sections 17 and 18. It requires accountability of leadership — which protects members against capture of the union by a self-perpetuating clique. It mandates financial transparency — which protects the general fund from misappropriation. These are preconditions for democratic representation, and the statute makes them legally mandatory rather than voluntarily aspirational.¹

The Registrar’s ministerial role — Sections 7 and 8

Section 7 permits the Registrar to call for further information where the application is deficient, and to require alteration of the name if it is identical or deceptively similar to an already-registered union.¹ These are limited, defined powers. They do not authorise a substantive judgment about the desirability of the proposed union, its industrial usefulness, or its representativeness.

Section 8 then provides that once the Registrar is satisfied that the union has complied with the Act, she shall register the union and issue a certificate of registration.¹

The word “shall” is decisive. Registration is a statutory right, not a discretionary grant. Courts have consistently held that the Registrar cannot refuse registration because she considers the union politically inconvenient or insufficiently representative. To do so would transform a ministerial administrative function into a political gatekeeping power — one the legislature deliberately withheld.⁴⁵

The certificate of registration issued under Section 9 is conclusive evidence of due registration.¹ Third parties — employers, courts, and industrial tribunals — can rely on it without an independent inquiry into whether the union meets the statutory conditions.

Legal consequences — Section 13

Section 13 provides the legal transformation that registration accomplishes. Every registered trade union shall be a body corporate by the name under which it is registered, with perpetual succession and a common seal, with the power to acquire and hold property, to contract, and to sue and be sued in its own name.¹

This language is familiar from company law and cooperative society law. The union, once registered, stands in the same jurisprudential position as any other incorporated entity. Its legal existence is institutional, not personal. Changes of leadership, deaths of founding members, shifts in membership — none of these dissolve the legal person. The union persists.¹

The practical consequences follow directly. Union property — the office, the welfare fund, the vehicle, the bank account — belongs to the union, not to its officers. Enforcement of collective agreements, defence against civil suits, prosecution of applications before industrial tribunals — all conducted in the union’s own name. The union’s liabilities are the union’s liabilities, not the personal liabilities of its individual members at any given moment.¹

Section 13 completes the transformation that Section 8 initiates. Registration is the legal event. Section 13 is the legal consequence. The union becomes legible to the law — a person with rights, obligations, and institutional continuity.¹

III. Registration Is Not Recognition

This is the point on which popular accounts, and occasionally judicial ones, most consistently go wrong. Registration and recognition are conceptually distinct, legally separate, and practically divergent in their effects on the employment relationship.

Registration is the union’s relationship with the State. It confers legal personality and the immunities of Sections 17 and 18. It is a matter of statutory right conditioned on formal compliance. It says nothing about whether any employer is obliged to deal with the union at all.

Recognition is the union’s relationship with the employer. It means the employer accepts the union as the representative body for the workforce and agrees to negotiate on terms and conditions of employment. Without recognition, the employer can legally refuse to meet the union — no matter how many workers it represents, how long it has been registered, how organised and democratically constituted it is.⁶

The Trade Unions Act, 1926 provided no mechanism for compulsory recognition at the central level. This is the single most consequential structural gap in the old law. An employer faced with a registered and representative union could choose to ignore it entirely, and the law provided no remedy. Whether to recognise a union was a business decision, not a legal obligation.⁶

The multiplicity problem

The absence of a statutory recognition mechanism produced what labour lawyers came to call the multiplicity problem. In many large establishments — particularly in public sector undertakings, railways, banks, and major manufacturing concerns — several unions simultaneously claimed to represent overlapping segments of the workforce. A general union, a craft union, a regional union, a politically affiliated union, a management-supported union: all registered, all lawful, all competing for the employer’s recognition.

The employer retained broad discretion. Courts held that the employer had a choice of which union to recognise, provided that choice was not made in bad faith — for example, by favouring a company union formed specifically to exclude a genuinely representative rival.⁶ This discretion, in practice, meant that militancy could be penalised and accommodation could be rewarded without any legal remedy for the excluded union.

The industrial consequence was fragmentation. Workers who needed unified representation found themselves divided among competing organisations, each seeking recognition — some through industrial pressure and some through political alignment. Collective bargaining in the textbook sense — a single representative union negotiating on behalf of a defined bargaining unit — was the exception rather than the rule.⁶

Judicial treatment of the recognition claim

All India Bank Employees’ Association v. National Industrial Tribunal AIR 1962 SC 171 established that Article 19(1)(c) of the Constitution — the right to form associations and unions — does not carry a fundamental right to recognition or to achieve the union’s objects.⁷ The constitutional right to associate does not translate automatically into a right to compel the employer to bargain collectively. That remains a matter of legislative choice, not constitutional guarantee.⁷

B.R. Singh v. Union of India (1989) 4 SCC 710 clarified the constitutional position comprehensively. The right to form unions under Article 19(1)(c) must be substantive — it includes the right to engage in collective bargaining and concerted industrial action as part of the associational purpose.⁸ At the same time, the Court drew a sharp distinction between that associational right and any fundamental right to recognition or to strike. Restrictions on strikes in essential services under statutes like the Essential Services Maintenance Act, 1981 were upheld as reasonable restrictions under Article 19(4).⁸

Non-statutory and state-level responses

The recognition gap was partially addressed through four mechanisms. First, voluntary recognition by employers where stable collective bargaining was economically rational. Second, Section 18 of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, which gives settlements between employers and recognised unions binding effect on all workers in the establishment — creating incentives to identify a bargaining counterpart even without mandating which union to recognise. Third, state-level legislation — most notably the Maharashtra Recognition of Trade Unions and Prevention of Unfair Labour Practices Act, 1971, which created a statutory process for recognising representative unions in specified undertakings and prohibiting employer anti-union practices.⁶ Fourth, the Second National Commission on Labour (2002) recommendation for a central statutory recognition mechanism based on verified membership — a recommendation that was not implemented under the old law but fed directly into the drafting of the 2020 Code.²

The Industrial Relations Code, 2020 — the modern answer

The Industrial Relations Code, 2020 has subsumed the Trade Unions Act, 1926 and is in force from 21 November 2025. Section 14 of the Code introduces, for the first time at the central level, a statutory recognition mechanism. Where only one registered trade union functions in an establishment, that union must be recognised as the sole negotiating union. Where multiple unions are present, the union with at least fifty-one per cent of the workers on the muster roll is to be recognised as the sole negotiating union. Where no single union commands fifty-one per cent, a negotiating council is to be constituted from unions each having at least twenty per cent support, allocated in proportion to membership.²

This is a historic shift. Recognition is no longer purely a privilege the employer may or may not confer. It is a statutory entitlement conditioned on democratic legitimacy measured by membership. The practical implementation — how membership is verified, what happens when a union loses its majority, how disputes about the count are resolved — remains to be developed through rules and practice. But the principle has shifted.

The core distinction survives under the new law as under the old. Registration gives legal existence. Recognition gives bargaining authority. The 1926 Act secured the first unconditionally; the 2020 Code has moved to secure the second conditionally. Understanding why that gap existed for ninety years, what it cost workers in representational terms, and how it shaped Indian industrial relations — that is the analytical heart of this area of law.¹²⁶

IV. Officers of a Trade Union — Sections 21A and 22

Two provisions regulate who may lead a registered trade union.

Section 21A provides for disqualification of office-bearers. A person convicted of any offence involving moral turpitude and sentenced to imprisonment is disqualified from being or continuing as an office-bearer for a period of five years from the date of conviction or from the date of release, whichever is later.¹ Trade unions are custodians of collective funds, fiduciaries of the workers they represent, and participants in processes — negotiations, arbitrations, industrial tribunals — where integrity is a precondition for effectiveness. A leadership tainted by convictions involving dishonesty or moral turpitude undermines both the credibility of the organisation and the confidence of the members it represents.

Section 22 addresses the proportion of office-bearers who must be “insiders” — persons actually engaged or employed in the industry with which the union is connected. The requirement is that not less than one-half of the total number of office-bearers of every registered trade union shall be persons actually engaged or employed in the industry, subject to special or general exemption orders of the appropriate government.¹

This provision occupies the intersection of two competing theories of unionism. On one view, unions must be worker-led, with leadership drawn from the shop floor, to keep industrial relations anchored in the lived experience of workers rather than in the political calculations of external organisers. On another view, professional organisers — lawyers, experienced negotiators, political functionaries — bring skills and resources that rank-and-file workers in many industries lack, and their participation is essential to organisational effectiveness.

The statutory compromise is the insider majority. Outsider participation is permitted — this is a ceiling approach, not a blanket prohibition — but numerical control must remain with persons who actually share the industrial conditions of the membership they lead. Retired and retrenched workers are typically treated as insiders for this purpose, preserving leadership continuity while protecting the authenticity of representation.¹

V. Section 15 — Lawful Objects and the General Fund

Section 15 enumerates the objects for which the general funds of a registered trade union may be applied. These include: payment of salaries, allowances, and expenses to office-bearers; administrative expenses; prosecution or defence of legal proceedings to which the union or any member is a party; conduct of trade disputes; compensation for loss arising from trade disputes; allowances to members or their dependants on account of death, old age, sickness, accidents, or unemployment; provision of educational, social, or religious benefits for members; and upkeep of periodicals connected with union objects.¹

The function of Section 15 is to define the “lawful” sphere of trade union activity. This matters because Sections 17 and 18 — the criminal and civil immunities — protect acts done in furtherance of objects of the trade union specified in Section 15. If a union acts outside those objects, the immunity shield may not apply.¹

The political fund is governed not by Section 15 but by Section 16. This distinction matters and is frequently obscured. Section 16 permits a registered trade union to maintain a separate fund, constituted from contributions made specifically and voluntarily for that purpose, to be applied for the promotion of civic and political interests of members.¹ The statute expressly prohibits compelling any member to contribute to the political fund. Non-contributors cannot be deprived of membership rights or benefits by reason of their non-contribution.

The separation reflects a principled legislative design. The law acknowledges that unions are inevitably political actors — wages, working conditions, and social protection are inherently matters of public policy — but it refuses to allow political expenditure to be silently absorbed into the compulsory costs of union membership. A worker who joins a union to improve her working conditions is not thereby consenting to fund electoral campaigns for candidates she may oppose. The separation preserves a measure of individual political freedom within the structure of collective organisation.¹

VI. Criminal Immunity — Section 17

The pre-1926 position

Before the Trade Unions Act, combined worker action was legally precarious in two distinct ways. The first was criminal. Under Section 120B of the Indian Penal Code, criminal conspiracy consists in an agreement to do or cause to be done an illegal act, or a legal act by illegal means. A concerted decision by workers to withhold their labour to compel higher wages could be characterised as conspiring to cause wrongful loss to the employer — an unlawful object — or to use illegal means of economic coercion. Even without any accompanying violence, the mere agreement to take collective industrial action could attract prosecution.¹⁴

Colonial emergency legislation reinforced this vulnerability. Workers could be prosecuted for assembly, conspiracy, or incitement in the context of labour disputes. Labour organisers operated under constant threat of criminal liability. Many workers and potential organisers were deterred precisely when industrial action was most needed.⁴

The scope of Section 17

Section 17 of the Trade Unions Act, 1926 provides that no office-bearer or member of a registered trade union shall be liable to punishment under sub-section (2) of Section 120B of the Indian Penal Code in respect of any agreement made between the members for the purpose of furthering any object of the trade union specified in Section 15, unless the agreement is an agreement to commit an offence.¹

Four conditions define the scope of the immunity precisely.

First, it applies only to members and office-bearers of registered trade unions. Non-registered combinations do not benefit. This creates a statutory incentive to register and enter the institutional framework the Act constructs.

Second, the immunity covers only agreements made between members. Conspiracies with third parties outside the union membership are not protected.

Third, the act must be in furtherance of objects of the kind specified in Section 15. The criminal immunity is tied to the lawful scope of union activity and reinforces the importance of Section 15 as the gateway.

Fourth, and critically: the agreement must not itself be an agreement to commit an offence. A resolution to call a strike in pursuit of higher wages is protected. A resolution to destroy machinery, assault strike-breakers, or commit arson is not protected — those acts are independently criminal, and the immunity does not convert a criminal conspiracy into protected union activity merely because its participants are union members.¹

The practical effect of Section 17 is transformative. The meeting of a union executive committee at which a collective decision is made to call industrial action — that meeting, which before 1926 could have been the subject of a criminal conspiracy charge — is now a lawful deliberative exercise, protected from criminal prosecution so long as the agreed action is within the scope of Section 15. Section 17 converted the union executive meeting from a criminal-risk space into a lawful bargaining space.¹

VII. Civil Immunity — Section 18 and the Golden Formula

The pre-1926 tort exposure

The tort of inducing breach of contract — established in English common law in Lumley v. Gye (1853) and adopted into Indian common law — provides that a person who knowingly and unjustifiably induces another to breach a subsisting contract commits a civil wrong and is liable in damages. Applied to industrial relations: a union that calls a strike induces its members to breach their individual contracts of employment. The employer can sue union officials and the union for damages and seek injunctions to stop the strike before it takes industrial effect.¹

The tort of interference with trade or business adds a further layer. Even without inducing a specific breach, causing deliberate economic harm to the employer through a boycott, secondary picketing, or withdrawal of labour could expose union officers to civil proceedings. Without protection from these liabilities, industrial action could be neutralised by any employer with access to sympathetic courts. Section 18 was designed to close these avenues.¹

The text of Section 18

Section 18(1) provides that no suit or other legal proceeding shall be maintainable in any civil court against any registered trade union, or any office-bearer or member thereof, in respect of any act done in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute to which a member of the trade union is a party, on the ground only that such act induces some other person to break a contract of employment, or is in interference with the trade, business, or employment of some other person, or with that person’s right to dispose of his capital or his labour as he wills.¹

Section 18(2) extends the immunity to tortious acts done in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute, provided the act does not itself constitute an offence.¹

The golden formula

The operative phrase — “in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute” — is sometimes called the “golden formula” in labour law scholarship, reflecting parallel language in British industrial legislation. Its reach is deliberately wide. “Contemplation” covers anticipatory industrial action taken before a dispute has fully crystallised — preparatory meetings, membership ballots, solidarity declarations, and calls to action made in anticipation of a developing conflict. “Furtherance” covers acts taken in the middle of an ongoing dispute to press collective demands and maintain industrial pressure. Both limbs are assessed objectively.¹

The limits of Section 18

The immunity is protective, not absolute. It does not extend to:

• Acts involving actual or threatened violence or intimidation — those remain tortious and potentially criminal regardless of industrial purpose
• Civil wrongs committed otherwise than in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute — the formula must actually be satisfied
• Tortious acts unconnected with interference with trade, business, or employment — defamation, trespass, and fraud bearing no relation to the industrial context remain fully actionable
• Acts that themselves constitute criminal offences — the Section 18(2) immunity is expressly conditioned on the act not being an offence

The civil immunity is functional rather than absolute. Its function is to preserve the economic effectiveness of collective industrial pressure by removing the civil law threat that would otherwise make strike action commercially ruinous for union officers and financially catastrophic for the union. It does not create a zone of lawlessness. It creates a zone of industrial citizenship — a space in which collective economic pressure can be applied without the law treating it as equivalent to a civil wrong against the employer.¹

Sections 17 and 18 as the twin foundations of collective action

Sections 17 and 18 are, together, the most important provisions of the 1926 Act. Section 17 disarms the principal criminal weapon — the conspiracy doctrine — against collective industrial agreements within the scope of lawful union objects. Section 18 removes the principal civil weapons — inducing breach and interference with trade — for peaceful industrial action done in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute that does not itself constitute an offence.¹

Without Section 17, the union executive faces criminal prosecution whenever it deliberates on strike action. Without Section 18, every strike is simultaneously a civil wrong generating liability in damages. Together, they convert collective action from a legally hazardous undertaking into a protected activity. They do not immunise violence, fraud, or independent criminal acts. But they ensure that the law is not itself an instrument for suppressing collective organisation before the industrial contest begins.¹

This is the deeper jurisprudential point. Labour law, as Kahn-Freund observed, does not merely regulate a pre-existing natural relationship between employer and worker. In an important sense it constitutes one — by deciding which parties are empowered to participate and on what terms. The twin immunities of the 1926 Act constitute the possibility of collective bargaining in India. Their creation in 1926 was a contested and indispensable legislative choice. Their preservation in the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 confirms that this foundational settlement, despite a century of debate, remains operative.¹²⁴

VIII. The Modern Position — Industrial Relations Code, 2020

The Trade Unions Act, 1926 has been subsumed into the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, in force from 21 November 2025. The Code consolidates the 1926 Act, the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, and the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 1946 into a single legislative instrument.²

The essential architecture of the 1926 Act is preserved. The definition of “trade union,” the seven-member registration threshold, the legal personality conferred by registration, the rules requirements, the insider-majority principle for office-bearers, the separation of general fund from political fund, and the equivalents of the criminal and civil immunities — all carry forward with modifications rather than fundamental revision.²

The recognition innovation under Section 14 — the statutory right to recognition at fifty-one per cent membership — has been discussed above. Whether that mechanism successfully reduces multiplicity and creates stable bargaining relationships will depend on the details of membership verification and enforcement.

For examination purposes, the 1926 Act framework remains the appropriate analytical starting point. The doctrinal concepts, the case law interpreting them, and the framework for understanding registration, recognition, and immunity are derived from the text and history of the 1926 Act. Students should acknowledge that the 2020 Code is the current law, and should identify the Code’s recognition mechanism as the modern legislative answer to the most persistent structural defect of the old regime.¹²

IX. Key Authorities

Rangaswami Naidu v. Registrar of Trade Unions AIR 1962 Mad 231 — the Madras High Court held that a trade union under Section 2(h) requires a nexus with “trade or business” in the statutory sense. Employees of the Raj Bhavan engaged in sovereign functions were outside the Act. The case establishes the Registrar’s limited, ministerial role and the outer boundary of the Section 2(h) definition.⁵

The Tamil Nadu Non-Gazetted Government Officers’ Union, Madras v. Registrar of Trade Unions AIR 1962 Mad 234 — civil servants engaged in core sovereign functions were outside the Trade Unions Act because their employment lacked the requisite nexus with “trade or business.”³

Crompton Greaves Ltd. v. Its Workmen AIR 1978 SC 1489 — the Supreme Court discussed a strike one of whose purposes was union recognition by the employer. The case illustrates how recognition disputes migrate into and complicate disputes about the legality and justification of strikes in the absence of a statutory recognition regime.⁶

All India Bank Employees’ Association v. National Industrial Tribunal AIR 1962 SC 171 — Article 19(1)(c) does not guarantee that a union will be recognised by the employer or will achieve its objects. The constitutional right to associate does not translate automatically into a right to compel collective bargaining.⁷

B.R. Singh v. Union of India (1989) 4 SCC 710 — Article 19(1)(c) is not a hollow right; it includes the right to pursue the objects for which the union is formed, including collective bargaining and concerted action. Restrictions on strikes in essential services are reasonable restrictions under Article 19(4). The right to form unions and the right to recognition are analytically distinct.⁸

The author is a law student at Law Centre-1, Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.