Court Opinion

ID: 9419212
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:47:40.241398+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:16.276407
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Black,
dissenting, with whom
Mr. Justice Douglas and Mr. Justice Murphy concur.
I think the judgments should be reversed. It appears to me that the question in these cases is: Upon whom does the statute impose the duty of paying a minimum wage, the employer or someone else? There is no ambiguity in the congressional mandate that “Every employer shall pay to each of his employees . . . wages . . . not less than 30 cents an hour.” I am unable to agree that tips given to redcaps by travellers are “wages” paid to the redcaps by the railroad.
The employers here could have openly charged a fee for the services performed by redcaps. It appears that they have now adopted such a system. It is said that there is no practical difference between a system under which the railroads openly impose a charge on the public and one under which the redcaps accept from travellers so-called tips, treated by the railroad as a part of the redcaps' wages. Generally, the traveller who pays a railroad charge knows he is paying it to the railroad. One who gives a redcap a tip does not necessarily know that he is thereby helping the railroad to discharge its statutory duty *411of paying a minimum wage to its employees. The tip-paying public is entitled to know whom it tips, the redcap or the railroad. A plan like that before us, which covertly diverts tips from employees for whom the giver intended them to employers for whom the giver did not intend them and to whom any kind of tip doubtless would not have been voluntarily given, seems to me to contain an element of deception. And I think an interpretation of the F. L. S. A. which permits employers to benefit from such a plan does not accord with the meaning of the language used by Congress.