News — restaurant

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has ordered a White South Carolina restaurant manager to pay $546,000 as restitution to a Black man with intellectual disabilities after he forced him to work at an eatery under his management for five years without pay.

The recent ruling comes after a district court initially ordered 56-year-old Bobby Paul Edwards to pay $273,000 to John Christopher Smith in unpaid wages and overtime compensation after he reached a plea deal with authorities in 2019, The Washington Post reported. Edwards, who ran the J&J Cafeteria in Conway, was also sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of forced labor.

However, an April 21 ruling by the appellate court determined the district court “had erred” in not calculating the initial amount based on federal labor laws – meaning Smith was actually entitled to $546,000 or twice the amount. Smith, who worked at the restaurant from 2009 to 2014 without any remuneration, was also subjected to physical and racial abuse by Edwards during that period. Smith was also reportedly forced to work for over 100 hours every week and was not entitled to any day-offs.

“When an employer fails to pay those amounts (regular and overtime pay), the employee suffers losses, which includes the loss of the use of that money during the period of delay,” the ruling determined.

Smith, 43, started working at the eatery as a dishwasher and table busser in 1990 at the age of 12. And though he initially did not have any issues with the previous restaurant managers, things started to go south when Edwards took over in 2009. With the now-convicted Edwards in charge, Smith was denied his salary and was treated without any respect for human decency.

Edwards forced the Black worker to move into an apartment that was infested with roaches, The Washington Post reported. Smith’s attorneys said the apartment, which belonged to Edwards, was “sub-human,” “deplorable” and “harmful to human health.” Besides that, a Department of Justice report also stated Edwards subjected Smith to physical abuse. This included beating him into submission, whipping him with a belt, knocking him with pots and pans, and at one time, burning him with hot grease. Edwards also prevented Smith from having any contact with his family and threatened to call the police on him.

“Most of the time I felt unsafe, like Bobby could kill me if he wanted,” Smith said, per court documents. “I wanted to get out of that place so bad but couldn’t think about how I could without being hurt.”

Edwards was eventually arrested in 2014 after a lady whose daughter-in-law worked at the restaurant reported him to authorities. Workers at the restaurant were initially hesitant to report Edwards out of fear of retaliation from him.

“For stealing his victim’s freedom and wages, Mr. Edwards has earned every day of his sentence,” U.S. Attorney for the District of South Carolina Sherri A. Lydon reportedly said after his 2019 sentencing. “The U.S. attorney’s office will not tolerate forced or exploitative labor in South Carolina, and we are grateful to the watchful citizen and our partners in law enforcement who put a stop to this particularly cruel violence.”

Feleg Tsegaye was born to exiled Ethiopian parents in the United States. When he was 24 years old, he moved to Ethiopia to start the country’s first-ever online restaurant delivery service. Prior to leaving the U.S, he worked at the US Federal Reserve Bank.

In 2015, he launched Deliver Addis, an online restaurant delivery service in Ethiopia which allows customers to place orders from their favorite restaurants and also discover new ones. For Tsegaye, it was his own way of not only creating jobs in his country of origin but to change the way Ethiopians dine.

“What really prompted me to pursue this was the fact that we were creating a completely new industry that did not exist in Ethiopia,” Tsegaye told How We Made It In Africa. “It’s about getting customers what they want in the convenience of their homes and offices. It’s also about generating business for small and medium enterprises – like restaurants that cannot afford space or a good location – and creating jobs for young people as back-office staff or drivers.”

Across Africa, businesses being operated solely online are fast gaining popularity on the continent. This has been largely due to the spread of internet connectivity across the continent. While in some countries internet usage is low, it is high in other states.

Playing a pioneering role in Ethiopia’s e-commerce sector didn’t come easy for Tsegaye. At the time, internet penetration was low and was largely a platform not known to many in the country. Nonetheless, he persisted and now controls a big share of the market.

He was also confronted with other challenges such as the absence of addresses, power outages and inadequate internet connection.

“Our first internet shutdown was when I was on a flight to the US,” he recalled. In 2016, Ethiopia declared a state of emergency due to political instability, resulting in the shutdown of internet connectivity in the country.

“As an e-commerce business, that’s pretty much the worst possible thing that can happen – and I wasn’t even there when it happened,” he said. Although the business was unprepared for the internet shutdown, Tsegaye took advantage of the situation to do some intensive servicing and maintenance of his delivery bikes.

While at it, he took steps to keep the business afloat by designing offline processes for ordering – by phone, or SMS, when available. This saw order volumes go up. In June 2020, he secured funding from the Impact Angel Network to increase its capacity and efficiency to bring on new products and services and expand market share.

Following growing demand due to COVID-19, he expanded his services to include an online marketplace that enables Ethiopian consumers to shop for groceries and other essential goods online.

As part of moves to boost the country’s tourism and provide the foreign currency needed to revive the economy, Egypt has opened its first-ever restaurant and lounge in Giza’s pyramid plateau.

Named the 9 Pyramids Lounge, the restaurant’s unique location will enable visitors to have a special view of the plateau’s nine royal tombs. Unveiled on October 20, the restaurant is built on a total area of 1,341 square meters and comes with indoor and outdoor seating, as well as a private parking lot, according to authorities.

The inauguration ceremony last week saw in attendance the Tourism and Antiquities Minister Khaled el-Anany, CEO of Orascom Pyramids Entertainment Ashraf Halim, chairman and CEO of Orascom Naguib Sawiris, and others who were also thrilled to have observed the launching of a fleet of 30 electric buses that will shuttle tourists around the area.

At the moment, the buses will be the only means of transportation at the site, amid other restrictions have been made to preserve the monuments at the site, said Tourism and Antiquities Minister el-Anany.

“The completion of this development project, the increase in the capacity of Sphinx International Airport, and the inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) next year will change the tourism map of Cairo,” the minister said.

The Grand Egyptian Museum has been under construction for over a decade and is expected to attract tourists when opened to help fund developmental projects in the country.

Tourists have already started visiting the 9 Pyramids Lounge where they can either be seated at tables or on cushions on the floor while enjoying the views of the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Two “fine dining restaurants” and a cafe are expected to be opened in early 2021 in the area as other services will also be upgraded to match up to the “greatness of Egyptian civilization and the magnificence of this historical site,” said Sawiris, chairman and CEO of Orascom Naguib.

Ancient Egypt has often been the main reference point when interpreting the past and experience of Africa. Egyptian civilization has been identified as the cradle of all human civilization celebrated for its languages, governance structure and a long history of wealth, education and powerful Pharaohs.

All these have helped boost the country’s tourism sector, which was hit hard recently by the pandemic. In 2019, 13.6 million people visited Egypt and numbers were expected to exceed 15 million this year.

“It was a disaster for us, like the whole world,” el-Anani said this July when the country resumed regular international flights after over three months of closure. “We lost around $1bn per month and we’re estimating that we’ll still lose a lot of money during the coming weeks and months,” he was quoted by the BBC.

In July, museums were reopened and some foreign flights resumed to the provinces of South Sinai, Red Sea and Matrouh — the three coastal Egyptian governorates. “For the time being, you will see the beaches, the sun, the desert, water activities – it’s the open air and the sea,” the minister said at the time.

“Later on, we’ll open the Nile Valley, with Alexandria, Cairo, Luxor and Aswan,” he said.