working under the contractor. In the face of such a stand, the court held that it would not lie in their mouth to take a contradictory plea that they were also the workmen of the principal employer. In our case, there are no inconsistent sets of facts, though reliefs claimed are inconsistent with each other. As I have noted above, in our case, it was never the canteen workers' case that they were actually employees of the contractor and not of the Petitioner. As I have shown above, even in the very first petition, Writ Petition No.1661 of 1999, the express plea of the union was that the canteen workers were actually working as direct employees of the Petitioner and that the contract between the Petitioner and the canteen contractor was merely used as a camouflage to deny the benefits of regular employees of the Petitioner to the canteen workers. It may be that this set of allegations prompted the union to apply for a relief under Section 10, incorrectly though as it later turned out having regard to the judgments of the Supreme Court in the cases of Steel Authority of India Ltd. and K.V. Shramik Sangh (supra), but the same set of allegations certainly would entitle the union to the relief, now correctly formulated, for absorption on the basis of a sham and bogus contract between the canteen contractor and the Petitioner and direct relationship of employer-employee between the Petitioner and the canteen workers. This is not a case where the plea on which the relief is sought in the reference before CGIT is destructive of the plea made in the earlier proceedings. This is simply a case of an alternative relief, which, though inconsistent with the relief claimed earlier, is nevertheless maintainable on the same set of allegations as in the earlier case. There is, thus, no substance in the objection on the ground of inconsistent pleas.
