Nine judges asked who is a worker. The old test stays in the queue.

Nine judges spent a morning on a word that decides whether a nurse, a teacher or a welfare clerk is a worker the law will hear.

The Supreme Court on Thursday, by a 5:4 majority, reformulated the 1978 “triple test” for what counts as an “industry” under Section 2(j) of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947. The bench sat under Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, with Justices B.V. Nagarathna, P.S. Narasimha, Dipankar Datta, Ujjal Bhuyan, Satish Chandra Sharma, Joymalya Bagchi, Alok Aradhe and Vipul M. Pancholi. The reference — State of Uttar Pradesh versus Jai Bir Singh — had waited more than twenty years after a five-judge bench, in 2005, doubted the width of Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board versus A. Rajappa.

Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer’s 1978 test was simple and vast. An activity was ordinarily an industry if it was systematic, if employer and employee cooperated in an organised way, and if it produced or distributed goods or services to satisfy human wants. Profit was largely irrelevant. Capital was largely irrelevant. Hospitals, schools, clubs and government welfare departments walked into labour law. A nurse could raise an industrial dispute. A teacher could ask a labour court about termination. A welfare clerk was not a sovereign mystery. That width is why employers have spent decades calling the test a net that caught every organised human effort.

The majority did not throw the net away. The Chief Justice said the essential framework had stood the test of time, but some of its elements “could have been articulated differently” to match Section 2(j). Five judges therefore proposed a reformulated triple test. Four — Justices Nagarathna, Datta, Bhuyan and Bagchi — dissented on the merits. Justice Nagarathna said social-welfare work by a government department can still be industry, and that a 2005 reference was unnecessary. Justice Datta, with Justice Bhuyan, said the court was disturbing a quietus that had held for half a century without a public interest that justified the doubt. Justice Bagchi held the reference maintainable but refused the rewrite: the old test, he said, already carved out the casual and the domestic, and did not need a commercial motive smuggled back in.

The operational sentences matter more than the poetry. The reformulation is prospective. Pending cases before courts, tribunals and labour authorities under the 1947 Act will still be decided on the 1978 test. Judgments and settlements that can no longer be challenged stay undisturbed. The bench also refused to read the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 — in force from 21 November 2025 — through the 1978 judgment. The Code will have to be interpreted on its own text when a case arrives. The 1947 Act is repealed. A nine-judge rewrite that does not govern the live Code, and does not govern the old Act’s pending files, is a narrow tool. It is still a tool. The next hospital or school that is hired, fired or unionised under the new statute will not be able to treat Bangalore Water Supply as a “sweeping anchor.” That is the Chief Justice’s phrase.

Attorney General R. Venkataramani had told the bench the old tests were good but had been applied too far, especially to sovereign and welfare functions. Senior advocate Indira Jaising had said a beneficial statute should not be narrowed by importing a commercial threshold, and that many “sovereign” services are already done by private hands. The majority’s unpublished detail — the exact new wording — is still in the reserved text. Until that text is read, nobody can say who fell out of the definition. What is public is the split, the prospectivity, the stay of the old test on the old files, and the refusal to pre-interpret the 2020 Code.

Who is a worker is not a seminar. It is whether a contract nurse can reach a labour forum, whether a government-school peon has a reinstatement remedy, whether a welfare-scheme employee is a guest in her own workplace. A 5:4 court has said the 1978 sentence was too loose to copy forward and too settled to rip up behind. The queue keeps the old law. The future does not. That is Thursday’s holding. The worker who is hired tomorrow will find out what the new sentence actually says only when the full judgment is out — and when the first tribunal under the Code is forced to read it.