Re: Customer's right to determine who is entitled to his tip

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Why do no refuse cite differing opinions?

In one memorable case, Leighton v. Old Heidelberg (1990) 219 Cal.
App. 3d 1062, the court was called upon to decide whether a
restaurant, in firing a waitress for refusing to share her tips
with the busboys, violated a statute declaring that a tip is the
property of “the employee or employees to whom it was paid.”

Answering that the restaurant did no wrong, Lillie, joined by
Woods, explained that in leaving a gratuity, a diner “rewards for
good service no matter which one of the employees directly
servicing the table renders it,” and that nothing in the law
prohibits an employer from determining how a tip should be
distributed, “as long as the employer does not pocket it.”

Johnson, in a vigorous dissent, argued that mandatory pooling of
tips “is just a disguised way of requiring waiters or waitresses to
pay the market salaries of busboys and bartenders,” and has a huge
impact on wait staff who depend on tips for the bulk of their
income.

The court, he argued, should have deferred to the view of the state
Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, which said that tip-
pooling arrangements violated the Labor Code unless voluntarily
agreed to by the employees.

“The law must be as vigilant in its protection of the property
rights of ordinary working people as it is of the property rights
of the largest corporation or the wealthiest landowner,” Johnson
wrote. “How would the courts react if a private person unilaterally
decided to divest a business of a fifth of its earnings and hand
them over to another businessman? Or to chop off a fifth of a
landowner’s holdings and give the land to her neighbor?”

One last question.

Aren't property rights a Consitutional issue?