A. SORIANO Y CIA, PETITIONER AND APPELLANT, VS. GONZALO M. JOSE ELPIDIO MENDOZA ET AL., RESPONDENTS AND APPELLEES.

This is an appeal from an order of the Court of First Instance of
Manila denying a petition for Certiorari filed against Judge Almeda
Lopez of the municipal court. The question for decision is whether the
jurisdiction of the municipal court is governed by the amount of each
claim or by the aggregate sum of all the claims when there are several
plaintiffs suing jointly but having Independent causes of action.

The essential facts are not in dispute. Alleging that prior to August
28, 1948, A. Soriano y Cia. engaged the plaintiffs as employees or
laborers at its surplus department at Sta. Mesa yard in different
capacities, and that on diverse dates between May 17 and September 30,
1948, Soriano y Cia. had dismissed them without cause, the plaintiffs,
twenty-nine in number, brought a joint complaint in the municipal
court, which was docketed as Civil Case No. 6058, against their former
employer, praying that judgment be rendered sentencing the defendant to
pay each of them one month salary in lieu of 30 days’ notice. The total
of the claims is P5,235, and the largest single claim is P300.
Contending that the municipal court had no jurisdiction to try the
action because the amount of the demand exceeded P2,000, exclusive of
interest and costs, the defendant filed a motion to dismiss, and, after
that motion was denied, instituted proceedings for certiorari in the
Court of First Instance, the result of which is stated at the outset of
this decision.

It is admitted that the plaintiffs’ demands
are separate, distinct and independent of one another. Nevertheless, it
is also admitted that the plaintiffs’ Joint suit is proper, expressly
authorized by Section 6 of Rule 3, entitled “Permissive Joinder of
Parties,” which provides that “All persons in whom or against whom any
right to relief in respect to or arising out of the same transaction or
series of transactions is alleged to exist, whether jointly severally,
or in the alternative, may, exeept as otherwise provided in these
rules, join as plaintiffs or be joined as defendants in one complaint,
where any question of law or fact common to all such plaintiffs or to
all such defendants may arise in the action.”

The point
wherein the parties are not in agreement is whether the claim of each
plaintiff or the aggregate claims of all is the measure of
jurisdiction. This question has been the subject of decisions by
.American courts. In Hackner vs. Guaranty Trust Co. of Hew
York (4 Fed. Rules Serv. 378; U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Second
Circuit, Jan. 13, 1941; 117 F. [2d] 95), it was held that, “When two or
more plaintiffs, each having a separate and distinct demand, join in a
single suit, the demand of each must be of the requisite jurisdictional
amount. Aggregation of the claims to make up the jurisdictional amount
is permitted only if the claims are of a joint nature, as when it is
sought to enforce a single right in which plaintiffs have a common
interest.” As American Jurisprudence, Vol. 14, p. 413, puts it, “Where
several claimants have separate and distinct demands against a
defendant or defendants, which may properly be joined in a single suit,
the claims can not be added together to make Up the required
jurisdictional amount; each separate claim furnishes the jurisdictional
test.”

The petitioner believes that the joining of plaintiffs
having separate claims should be controlled by the principle bearing on
the court’s jurisdiction in suits where one plaintiff alleges in one
complaint several independent causes of action, in which case it is the
aggregate amount which determines the jurisdiction. But there is a
fundamental difference between such cases and one like that before us.
In the first) the total demand accrues to one person, while in the
latter only part of the combined demand, which does not exceed the
jurisdictional amount, pertains to a single plaintiff. In other words,
the court takes into account what one party would recover and not what
is adjudged to all the parties or some of them.

There would
be more similarity if the present case were compared with one in which
several actions commenced by different plaintiffs, handled by the same
attorneys, raising the same questions, and founded on the same facts or
evidence, were tried together and only one judgment were handed down.
If the plaintiffs and the court had adopted such procedure, we do not
think that the court’s jurisdiction would be open to attack on the
ground that the judgment, by reason of the joint trial, adjudicated a
greater amount than the law allowed. Yet the only difference between
the hypothetical ease we have given and the ease at bar is that in the
latter, only one complaint was filed instead of as many as there are
plaintiffs. The sole effect, and we should say the sole purpose, of the
new rule on joinder of parties is to save them unnecessary work,
trouble and expense, consistent with the liberal spirit of the new
Rules, and not to enlarge the court’s jurisdiction as applied to the
amount in controversy.

It is in effect argued that plaintiffs
could, through collusion, shift the courts jurisdiction if individual
demands rather than their aggregate were used as the criterion. It is
the other way around; it is the adoption of the opposite theory, as we
see it, which would open the door to manipulation. Several plaintiffs
wishing to avoid trial in the justice of the peace court could combine
their demands in one complaint so as to put the action beyond the
jurisdiction of the inferior court.

Upon the foregoing
considerations, the judgment appealed from will be affirmed with costs
against the appellant. It is so ordered.

Ozaeta, Pablo, Bengzon, Montemayor, and Reyes, JJ., concur.