Restaurant chain paid workers below minimum wage and kept tips in Florida, feds say

An investigation revealed 100 employees were underpaid while working for a sushi burrito fast food chain based in northern Florida, federal officials say.

Kazu Sushi Burrito kept a portion of customer tips left for its workers and paid some employees below the hourly, federal minimum wage rate of $7.25 an hour, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. This occurred at four of the chain’s Jacksonville restaurants and a fifth location in St. Johns.

Additionally, the same employees who were paid less than minimum wage weren’t paid for overtime when they worked more than 40 hours in a week, officials said.

Now Kazu Sushi Burrito has paid its workers $215,190 in back wages they were owed after violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Labor Department announced in a Feb. 21 news release.

McClatchy News contacted Kazu Sushi Burrito for comment on Feb. 22 and didn’t immediately receive a response.

“Too often, restaurant industry workers are victims of wage theft by their employers,” Wildalí De Jesús, the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division director of its Orlando office, said in a statement. “These workers depend on every dollar they earn to provide for themselves and their families.

“There is no excuse for employers to intentionally deny these hard-working people their lawfully earned wages.”

The case comes after a separate Labor Department investigation found an ice cream franchise illegally kept more than 100 employees’ tips in Panama City Beach, McClatchy News previously reported. The company was ordered to pay $169,638 in back wages.

Employees can discover if they’re similarly owed back wages from their employer through the Wage and Hour Division’s search tool.

This story was originally published February 22, 2023 at 1:12 PM with the headline "Restaurant chain paid workers below minimum wage and kept tips in Florida, feds say."

Julia Marnin

McClatchy DC

Julia Marnin covers courts for McClatchy News, writing about criminal and civil affairs, including cases involving policing, corrections, civil liberties, fraud, and abuses of power. As a reporter on McClatchy’s National Real-Time Team, she’s also covered the COVID-19 pandemic and a variety of other topics since joining in 2021, following a fellowship with Newsweek. Born in Biloxi, Mississippi, she was raised in South Jersey and is now based in New York State.