Some workers at SeaWorld won’t get paid for shutdown

As the theme park capital of the world is closed for business Monday, at least some of SeaWorld’s part-time workers — the brunt of its workforce — won’t be getting paid while full-time employees will see their hours cut by 20%, according to company memos.

SeaWorld, an Orlando-based company that runs 12 theme parks across the country, hasn’t responded to questions about its employees’ pay during the unprecedented shutdown, but the Orlando Sentinel obtained company messages from the employee portal. SeaWorld did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the memos.

“Part-time ambassadors will not be scheduled or paid during this time unless communicated otherwise by your leadership,” the message to employees said.

At the end of 2019, there were nearly 11,000 part-time employees versus 4,300 full-time workers, according to a SEC filing last month. The company isn’t unionized like Disney World.

SeaWorld has about 6,000 employees locally, according to the Orlando Economic Partnership.

SeaWorld’s handling of the shutdown is different from Disney and Universal, which have said they plan to pay their “scheduled workers” through March regardless of whether they were parttime or full-time. SeaWorld is also overcoming years of financial instability and layoffs so it doesn’t have the same deep pockets as the Walt Disney Company or the Comcast-owned Universal parks although it still turned a $90 million profit last year on $1.4 billion in revenue.