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At a rally outside Philadelphia International Airport today, workers and members of Fight for Philly and SEIU 32BJ protested airport workers' wages and turned the focus on Mayor Nutter and City Council.
“[Nutter] can literally change the lives of thousands of workers,” said Rev. Greg Holston of the New Vision United Methodist Church in Philadelphia. The call to reform comes in anticipation of a hearing during which members of City Council will review the lease agreement between the city and US Airways. Currently, airport and airline subcontractors employe nearly a thousand workers who earn a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, or $2.83 plus tips.
The "Poverty at PHL Doesn't Fly" campaign seeks the extension of the 21st Century Living Wage and Benefits Standard to airport workers. The standard has been in place since 2005, and City Council recently passed an ordinance introduced by Councilman Wilson Goode Jr. to extend that living wage — 150 percent of federal minimum wage — to employees of airport subcontractors and sub-lessees. However, the administration informed Council that it was not bound by that ordinance and would not, therefore, enforce it.
Workers say that being employed by a subcontractor does not make their needs any less than those employed by primary contractors.
“We want [to be paid] enough to make us feel dignified and human,” said Onethea McKnight, an airport worker for 10 years who has never received a raise from her $7-per-hour starting wage.
Next up, workers and activists are inviting the Mayor and City Council to, “walk a day in our shoes” during which the Mayor or a City Council member would spend a day following an airport worker around, from “the moment they get up in the morning … to the moment they go to bed at night,” said Julie Blust of 32BJ.
A weird and wild story written in 2011 by then-staff-writer Isaiah Thompson caught the attention of Assistant DIstrict Attorney Matthew Perks. The story was about a scammer, Dwayne Stewart, who "stole" the family house of a West Philadelphia man, Gerald Sterrett, and his daughter and son-in-law. As Thompson wrote:
One day, while Stewart and the Conners were still negotiating a possible lease arrangement, Stewart asked Sterrett to borrow the keys — just, as Sterrett tells it, to show his future home to his mother. But — according to Sterrett and his family — Dwayne Stewart instead simply moved himself in at lightning speed, changed the locks and installed security cameras around the perimeter. Now, almost a year later, they still can't get him out.
As reported today in the Inquirer, Assistant D.A. Perks read Thompson's story and decided to open an investigation. The Inquirer reports that as part of the new set of charges, Stewart is accused of defiant trespass, a felony, for taking over the property.
Stewart is also accused of "forging deeds to illegally transfer three houses and two vacant lots to his own possession, 'selling' properties he didn't own to unsuspecting third parties, and pocketing rent and security deposits for houses and apartments he didn't have authority to lease." Oh, and he's a convicted sex offender too.
Yesterday, amid the pre-City Council glad-handing in City Hall, Councilman Curtis Jones was building up a head of steam. The reason for his outrage? Neighborhoods in his district like Manayunk and Roxborough had been excluded from the Greater Philadelphia Marketing and Tourism Corp.'s (GPTMC) brand-new Philadelphia Neighborhoods campaign, which launches today. The campaign — which will hopefully help regional visitors in particular gain a more refined understanding of what Philly offers beyond the LIberty Bell — "spotlights 14 of the visitor-ready areas that surround Center City. In these outrageously cool ’hoods, you can explore the storied streets, buzzed-about restaurants, craft beer-centric bars, emerging art galleries, indie shops, intimate music venues, plentiful parks and annual festivals," according to the press materials.
Jones was unconvinced. "Manayunk is hot! Roxborough is hot!" he insisted. "The history of Ridge Avenue and Germantown Avenue, the fun and vibrancy of Main Street is equal to any place in the city, any place in the world. But if people don't know about it …"
Gov. Tom Corbett may be warming to the idea of some sort of Medicaid expansion in Pennsylvania, but when it comes to his reputation among progressives it's way too late for damage control. Well, Corbett may be way down in the polls, but he's made the final four of Progress Now's March Badness, beating out the likes of Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the running for most "outrageous, radical, out-of-touch right-winger." Ninth-seeded Corbett's claim to fame in the competition? His famous statement that women who don't want to view mandatory, pre-abortion ultrasounds can "just close your eyes."
While a state law requiring licensing of massage therapists in Pennsylvania may have move human-trafficking victims out of the massage industry, City Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown says that many of those victims are now working at so-far-unregulated touch-therapy facilities, advertising services such as reiki or acupressure. She introduced a bill today to close that loophole, which she says she came across during an investigation of human trafficking in Philadelphia.
Brown says the state regulations, which were enacted in 2008 and took full effect in January 2012, included exceptions for a broad range of services outside standard massage therapy. "I do not know how or why these exemptions were granted, but I can almost guarantee that they were not conceived of or implemented at the suggestion of a woman," she said in a statement.
Despite the expense of interest-rate swaps to Philly's city government and school district — estimated at more than $331 million — the city is still entangled with swaps from which critics say it would cost the city and school district $240 million to extricate itself. This morning, Philadelphia City Council passed a resolution urging the state legislature to prohibit municipalities in Pennsylvania from participating in swap deals.
Councilman Jim Kenney, who introduced the resolution, said this was an example of Council weighing in formally after its attempts at more subtle pressure on the issue failed. "We've been trying to get the administration to sue some these banks to get some of the money back or to waive the penalty fees for us to get out of these deals," Kenney said. Moreover, he added, "There has been some lobbying to exempt Philadelphia from the [statewide] ban" on using the financial vehicles.
Damon K. Roberts is probably best known as a candidate for Pennsylvania state Representative and Philadelphia City Council's Second District, having made three failed bids for various elected posts in the past several years. But Roberts' clients have apparently seen a different side of him: An attorney who fails to provide competent representation, misses filing deadlines, fails to return fees for incomplete work, doesn't return clients' calls, misinforms clients in order to collect further legal fees, and even, on one occasion, advises clients to engage in fraudulent conduct.
That's based on a petition submitted by Roberts and Pennsylvania's Office of Disciplinary Counsel to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Disciplinary Board, which on March 28 agreed to suspend Roberts from legal practice for 30 months. "A thirty-month suspension is the appropriate quantum of discipline to be imposed to protect the public from this patently unfit practitioner," the petition concludes. Roberts did not return a call to his cell phone, where the outgoing voice-mail message still identifies him as "attorney Damon K. Roberts."
The admissions outlined in the 82-page petition describe Roberts making matters worse for clients who were already dealing with tough situations, including losing their homes. Take for example Thanimus Scott, who hired Roberts to help her stave off foreclosure. Roberts took a $1,500 deposit from Scott but missed numerous filing deadlines, then provided a false reason to the court about why a deadline was missed. "As a result of Respondent's failure to act with reasonable diligence, on July 23, 2010, Ms. Scott filed a bankruptcy petition to save her home … [and] incurred additional expenses, including interest, penalties, foreclosure fees and bankruptcy costs," the petition notes.
In another case, Roberts took a deposit from mother and son Sheila and Lawrence Murray to negotiate the prevention of their home's disposition by sheriff's sale — even after his paralegal informed him their house had already been sold at sheriff's sale that very morning. Roberts "instructed [the paralegal], "Don't tell her [Ms. Murray]. Wait until after she pays us." For the next two months, Roberts took no action on the case and did not "promptly discuss with Ms. Murray any options that might have been available to accomplish her objectives to stay in her house."
Either Philly's workers are one infirm bunch or there's waste somewhere in the city's workers' comp process, according to City Controller Alan Butkovitz, who released a report today claiming that the city's Risk Management Workers' Compensation Program cost Philly $54 million in 2011, up 26 percent from 2007, largely due to "excessive" use of physical therapy.
"The number of visits, and inherently the costs were staggering. Not only has this led to higher medical expenses, but also it has allowed employees to collect benefits under the Workers’ Compensation Program much longer than needed," Butkovitz said in a statement.
As we reported last week, Philadelphia residents who were set to be shifted into new City Council districts in a couple years are, thanks to a quiet maneuver by city lawmakers last month, under different representation as of yesterday. So how many people are impacted? Sarah Cordivano of @Mapadelphia figures that about 9.86 percent of the city, or 150,552 people will be making a move.
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
Lancaster Avenue gets no damn respect. This road was once a major thoroughfare — one of the most important single streets in early America. This surface lot that sits on its 3400 block sucks ass. Though the lot's days SHOULD be numbered, a small group of angry NIMBYs is determined to keep it a surface lot for the rest of time.
The land this lot sits on was purchased in 1765 by a collaboration between two of Robert Morris' most trusted underlings, Tench Francis, Jr. and Thomas Willing. They were both the trustafarian sons of wealthy British families that had come to Proto-America. Willing was mayor of Philadelphia at the time and would go on to be a member of the Continental Congress and the first president of the Bank of the United States. Francis was his buddy that he not only worked with, but was related to by marriage. The Willing-Francis family would hold on to the land well into the mid-1800s.
In the early 19th Century, the land this surface lot sits on was part of a village called Greenville. Unlike the other West Philly villages of the period, Greenville's name did not survive as the name of a current neighborhood. Though Greenville didn't really have a definitive boundary, the lot is in an area that was on the easternmost edge of it.
One of the reasons Greenville's name never survived is because it was notoriously shitty backwater boozefest of a village. Cattle drivers who were on their way to Philadelphia from points west used the area as a final rest stop before coming into town along the Lancaster Turnpike Road (aka Lancaster Avenue), America's first highway. They would park their cattle along the undeveloped parts alongside Lancaster Ave. and get wasted at taverns near what is now 38th, 39th and 40th Streets. The area the lot sits on was the shittiest part of this shitty area. Cattle drivers would only park their herds here if all the other spaces in the main part of Greenville were taken. Greenville was also home to the first African-American neighborhood in West Philadelphia. Some think that some current residents of the Bottom are descended from residents of ancient Greenville. A few of the old taverns that were a part of Greenville survived into the 1970s.
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