A restaurant worker at Universal CityWalk’s Cowfish Sushi Burger Bar in Orlando has filed a lawsuit against Universal, accusing the billion-dollar entertainment complex of stealing her lawfully earned wages.
Tonia Roberts, 57, a food runner of about one year, specifically contends in her lawsuit that Universal improperly utilized Florida’s tip credit, ultimately paying her less than what she was lawfully owed for her work.
“Defendant [Universal] improperly utilized the tip credit and unjustly benefited by saving the tip credit amount for each hour Plaintiff worked,” the lawsuit, filed in the Orange County Court of the Ninth Judicial Circuit, claims. Jordan Benbow, an attorney with Crest Law, PLLC is representing Roberts in this case.
Florida’s current minimum wage for nontipped workers is $13 an hour, while workers who earn tips must be paid a minimum wage of at least $9.98 per hour. For tipped workers, that can include a tip credit of up to $3.02 per hour, meaning an employer can count up to $3.02 of the hourly minimum in earned tips.
Essentially, the tip credit allows employers to pay workers a lower base wage, with the expectation that earned tips will make up the difference.
Roberts’ lawsuit, however, accuses Universal — one of the largest employers in the Central Florida region — of improperly using the tip credit by too often assigning her “side work” that was not tip-producing — for instance, getting plates and silverware together and preparing sauces.
According to the lawsuit, Roberts was asked to perform “excessive amounts of such side work every shift, often for hours at a time” before, after and during Roberts’ “tip-producing activities.” The complaint states that altogether, this non-tip-producing “side work” made up more than 20% of her total work each week, in violation of the U.S. Department of Labor’s interpretation of how to properly utilize the tip credits system.
The lawsuit also argues Universal Orlando improperly used a tipping pool system by distributing tips to tipped workers as well as nontipped employees who have a higher wage floor.
A spokesperson for Universal Orlando, when reached for comment, declined to comment on Roberts’ lawsuit, stating the company does not comment on pending litigation. Roberts’ lawyer also declined to comment, but confirmed he was representing her.
Roberts herself told Orlando Weekly in a phone call that she only realized she was being underpaid after she reached out to a lawyer, after facing what she described as “retaliation” for speaking up about unsanitary kitchen equipment.
Back in September, she said she complained to management about “dirty bottles” containing sauces for customers’ food. She was told to take photos of the bottles, sometimes containing traces of multiple sauces, and yet, the problem didn’t get better. “I was told to put new labels on expired sauces,” she alleged in a text.
In fact, a week after she complained in early September, she said she saw her hours at the restaurant had been cut. That’s when Roberts decided to reach out to a lawyer, who looked at her pay sheets and saw she wasn’t getting paid all of what she was owed.
“It has made me pretty upset,” Roberts admitted. “I used to run my own establishment, and [that] sort of was draining me. So I came to Universal for a better life, for a better position.”
She explained she has a daughter who works at a different Universal Orlando establishment who was making 20-something dollars an hour on the job. Roberts was hopeful she could get a decent opportunity, too. “I thought it would be a great opportunity to get on with Universal,” she said. “But it has not been fun at all.”
Universal’s theme parks division — extending beyond its park in Orlando — reported $8.6 billion in revenue in 2024, down 3.7 percent from 2023, according to Theme Park Insider. The entertainment complex, owned by parent company Comcast, is also getting ready to open up its highly anticipated Epic Universe theme park at Universal Orlando Resort in May.
This isn’t the first time Universal has been accused of violating labor law. The Orlando theme park in 2023 was urged by the National Labor Relations Board to change anti-union and other unlawful policies, after a maintenance worker at the park filed a formal complaint — and won.
In 2016, Universal City Studios in California was forced to pay out a $1.8 million over class-action accusations of underpaying parking and food service workers at Universal Studios Hollywood, according to Law360.
Universal Orlando, unlike Disney World just south of Orlando in Lake Buena Vista, is completely non-union, and has for decades fended off unionization efforts through legally questionable tactics.
Universal reportedly fended off at least five unionization attempts in the 1990s, according to the Orlando Sentinel, including a unionization bid by performers with the labor union Actors Equity. In 1992, the union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board — a federal agency that enforces federal labor law — accusing Universal of firing or demoting at least 15 employees over their union activity.
But wage theft, a galvanizing issue in some organizing campaigns, is nothing new in the service and hospitality industries either. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the hotel and food service industries are some of the most prominent industry violators of wage and hour laws.
In 2024 alone, the federal division recovered more than $35 million in back wages for U.S. food service workers, $1.1 million for hotel and motel workers, and $322,541 for amusement workers, plus civil monetary penalties. In Florida,
Minimum wage enforcement by state officials in Florida, as Orlando Weekly has previously reported, is basically non-existent, despite data indicating that Florida has one of the highest minimum wage violation rates in the country. This lack of enforcement on a state level forces underpaid, largely low-wage workers to either turn to the federal labor department for help — which can only recover up to the federal minimum wage — or to a private lawyer.
Florida’s minimum wage for tipped and non-tipped workers has increased roughly $4 since 2020, when voters approved a statewide ballot initiative, Amendment 2, to gradually raise the minimum wage. It’s set to reach $15 an hour by Sept. 30, 2026 for non-tipped employees, and $11.98 an hour for tipped employees — a more-than-double increase since 2020.
Universal Orlando, for its part, is a prominent member of the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association, an industry trade group that helped spearhead a campaign to defeat Florida’s Amendment 2 in 2020. Dubbed “Amendment 2 Hurts You,” the business lobby’s campaign sought to spook Floridians into believing that raising wages would “kill jobs,” “have catastrophic impacts on small businesses” and “destroy Florida’s economy.”
Instead, more Floridians voted in favor of a $15 minimum wage that year than for either former President Joe Biden — who earned more than 1 million votes fewer than Amendment 2 — or Donald Trump, who earned roughly 700,000 votes fewer than the $15 minimum wage ballot measure in 2020.
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This article appears in Feb 12-18, 2025.