Cracking down on wage theft | Morning Newsletter
And a rural hospital slowly fades away.
The Morning Newsletter
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You can expect patchy fog and mostly cloudy skies. Temps will reach the high 70s.
Philadelphia is coming after employers that shirk city orders and refuse to pay their workers what they’re owed. For the first time in seven years, the city is suing an employer who broke its 2016 wage theft law.
Our lead story explores the city’s escalating efforts to enforce the worker protection.
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— Taylor Allen (@TayImanAllen, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)
The city filed a complaint in Common Pleas Court earlier this year against Joe Carvalho, a Philadelphia construction company owner who the city says broke its wage theft law twice.
Carvalho’s first violation, dated September 2020, was for stealing $4,822 from a worker.
Separately in March 2021, Carvalho didn’t pay an employee for eight days worth of work, totaling $1,105 in wages and overtime.
Necessary context: The lawsuit represents an escalation of the city’s efforts to enforce its 2016 wage theft law. In some cases, it can take years for workers to get paid after they win a wage theft claim. Some never get paid at all.
The Department’s Office of Worker Protections has begun taking legal action to force bad actors — employers that broke the law but refuse to adhere to city orders and pay workers what they’re owed — into compliance. Lawsuits are “an avenue of last resort,” the spokesperson said.
Continue reading to learn more about the lawsuit.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health shut down Berwick Hospital Center’s emergency room because of a lack of staffing, accelerating a closure its owners began planning earlier that summer.
The 90-bed facility is currently operating only as a 14-bed inpatient geriatric psychiatry facility.
Priyam Sharma, of Michigan, bought the hospital in 2020 amid the hospital’s financial troubles. The Sharma family, including Priyam’s husband, Sanjay Sharma, and their son, Sanyam Sharma, have bought and run at least two other hospitals.
Important note: One Sharma hospital, 200 miles southwest of Chicago, closed in January 2021 after the state found numerous health and safety violations. The Sharmas sold that hospital.
One doctor who worked at Berwick told The Inquirer it didn’t take long before the staff became concerned about the billing process, how records were being handled, and overall patient care. Some staffers contacted the FBI.
A defunct website for one Sharma affiliate — SBJ Group — claimed the company specialized in “hospital turnaround.” The former Berwick doctor believes the Sharmas wanted the hospital to fail so it could be flipped.
Keep reading to learn more about the continuing trend of rural hospitals shuttering.
What you should know today
Former President Donald Trump is charged with 34 felony counts for allegedly conspiring to influence the 2016 election through a series of hush money payments designed to silence claims he feared would negatively impact his candidacy.
Devin Weedon, 15, was laid to rest amid a plea for justice and an end to the city’s gun violence.
Antisemitic fliers that link Jewish people to pornography, abortion, fun control, and mass immigration are being distributed on SEPTA’s Market-Frankford Line trains. It’s the third reported instance of neo-Nazi paraphernalia infiltrating Philadelphia in the last month.
Nearly all of the Philadelphia mayoral candidates have been asked if they’d support the proposed Sixers arena in Center City but most haven’t provided a simple answer.
The University of Pennsylvania named its first female law school dean in the school’s more than 170-year history.
Philadelphia will become the first city to track instances of severe childbirth complications in real time.
Fewer millennials and GenZers are driving, citing cost, safety, and the environment.
Here’s your fun story of the day.
Meet Valerie Bertsch of Medford Lakes, New Jersey. She’s a real estate broker who turned her garage into a bunny cafe and home for foster rabbits.
She’s always been drawn to rabbits, so much that she decorated her home with paintings and sculptures of bunnies. But for most of her life, she only had cats and dogs as pets.
She finally took the plunge of getting her own as a pet two years ago.
Fast forward to today, she’s now fostering 10 bunnies and has two litter box-trained “house buns” of her own.
Keep reading to learn how she operates her cafe.
🧠 Trivia time 🧠
Spring is here which is also means the annual return of FDR Park’s Southeast Asian Market every Saturday and Sunday.
The season began last weekend. What month does the market’s season ends?
A) September
B) October
C) August
D) November
Find out if you know the answer.
What we’re...
📰 Reading: The third in a series of profiles about the top candidates for mayor. The installment features Cherelle Parker.
👀Watching: Finland joined NATO, a major blow to Russia over the war in Ukraine.
🧩 Unscramble the anagram 🧩
Hint: A James Beard nominee
AALAKY
We’ll select a reader at random to shout out here, and would love for you to send us your own original anagram to unscramble. Congratulations to Charlene M. Wiltshire, who correctly guessed Tuesday’s answer: Johnny Brenda’s. Email us if you know the answer.
Photo of the day
And that’s your news to start your Wednesday. I’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow. 📧