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13 February 22
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The effort to free Danny Fenster, a journalist imprisoned by Myanmar’s junta, shows a new threat to U.S. citizens worldwide.
The ruling military junta required that all travellers purchase their plane tickets ten days in advance and that airlines send passengers’ names to the government for review. After Fenster checked in, cleared security, and arrived at his gate, he felt a sense of relief. He would soon be on his way. A large group of police officers approached the airline agent and announced that they were looking for “Daniel Jacob.” Jacob was Fenster’s middle name. He sheepishly raised his hand. The officers told him they had a few questions to ask him about a criminal investigation. “That was the beginning of everything,” Fenster told me later.
As the police were leading him away, Fenster managed to text his wife, Juliana Silva, a Brazilian diplomat he had met in Myanmar and recently married, to let her know that he was being arrested. “Babe, not joking. Call the embassy. gotta go,” he wrote just before the phone was snatched out of his hand. The police took Fenster to a walled-off part of the airport and the crowd of officers steadily grew. For several hours, interrogators hounded Fenster about where he worked as officers scoured his electronic devices and rummaged through his luggage. An officer pulled a business card from Fenster’s bag and excitedly spoke with his colleagues, sparking a commotion. The card was from the news agency Myanmar Now, Fenster’s previous employer, and he had kept it as a souvenir. Myanmar Now had long been critical of the military, and after seizing power the junta had attempted to shut it down. The police informed Fenster that he was under investigation for “unlawful association” based on his connection to a banned news organization. “I explained over and over again that I worked there in 2020, and that I work at Frontier now,” Fenster recalled. “But it just seemed they had been given orders to find Danny Fenster, an employee of Myanmar Now, and to send him off to the next group that was going to investigate him.”
The officers at the airport blindfolded Fenster and trundled him into a van. When the blindfold was removed, Fenster was in what appeared to be a police station. Two men interrogated him. The environment was more menacing—Fenster was shackled to a chair while they fired off repetitive questions about why he had come to Myanmar and what he was doing in the country. Hours later, he was blindfolded again and taken to a new location. When this blindfold was taken off, he found himself in a courtroom inside Yangon’s Insein Prison, a notorious complex known as “the darkest hellhole in Burma.” Human-rights activists who had been imprisoned there said that it was rife with disease and that many former inmates suffered from mental illness. COVID-19 was rampant.
In 1962, the military seized power in a coup, later changing the name of the country from Burma to Myanmar. For fifty years, it was one of the most censored countries on earth. The restoration of a quasi-democracy under Aung San Suu Kyi led to a flowering of local media, with Burmese journalists returning from exile, and the emergence of new publications that tested the boundaries of Myanmar’s nascent press freedom. Journalists discovered clear limits. The military, a cultlike organization officially named the Tatmadaw, did not tolerate criticism. Dominated by a handful of élite families, it controlled business conglomerates, banks, hospitals, and schools, and its officers lived on private compounds across the country. Journalists who challenged the ruling generals faced criminal prosecution and sometimes jail. After the February, 2021, coup, the military sought to assert even greater control over the media, closing down critical outlets and prosecuting journalists.
Without a lawyer present, and with a translator who appeared to be a teen-ager, Fenster was charged with violating Section 505A of the country’s draconian criminal code, a provision that the junta had rewritten to ban the publication of “false news.” The charge, which the regime used to suppress accounts that questioned the legitimacy of the coup, carried a penalty of up to three years in prison. This can’t be happening, Fenster thought. Silva, who had spent the day frantically searching the city for her husband, arrived that evening outside Insein Prison. “I showed them a copy of his passport and they confirmed that he was taken there,” she recalled.
Fenster was brought to a cell, a seven-foot-by-nine-foot concrete box with one wall of metal bars and a small window. He slept fitfully. The following day, two investigators, assisted by the young translator, interrogated him for several hours, with the same never-ending barrage of questions intended, it seemed, to confirm their belief that he was in fact working for Myanmar Now. After several days, the interrogation stopped, and Fenster was left alone in his cell. Angry and frustrated, he imagined an American tank crashing through the prison’s walls to rescue him. “I just thought surely the United States, the declining but still most powerful country in the world, will have some sort of sway,” he said.
Fenster now believes he was arrested because bumbling officials actually did suspect that he worked for a banned publication. But once he was in custody he had become a bargaining chip in the fraught relationship between the generals ruling Myanmar and the Biden Administration, which had declined to recognize their new regime. Other authoritarian states, such as Iran, North Korea, and Russia, routinely jail Americans, looking for concessions from the U.S., but the government of Myanmar never made any public demands in exchange for Fenster’s release. However, it obviously wanted something in return. Figuring out what that was, providing the generals a face-saving way out, and protecting U.S. interests would require an intricate diplomatic dance. “What the other side wants is usually something we don’t want, or can’t do, or should not give,” Roger Carstens, the current Presidential envoy for hostage affairs, told me.
Since the nineteen-seventies, the abduction of Americans overseas has vexed Republican and Democratic Presidents alike. Under a no-concessions policy first articulated under Richard Nixon and affirmed by successive Administrations, including the Obama Administration, the U.S. will not negotiate with terror groups, but it can negotiate with states for the release of unlawfully detained Americans. Increasingly, as the war on terror has faded, it is autocrats—not terrorists—who are taking U.S. citizens hostage. Of the fifty-one Americans currently known to be held hostage overseas, roughly ninety per cent have been unlawfully detained by states, according to the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, an organization created by the family of James Foley, a journalist taken hostage and murdered by ISIS members in Syria, in 2014. Liz Frank, the executive director of Hostage U.S., an organization that provides support for the families of hostages, said that nearly three-quarters of the cases they currently handle involve unlawful detention by states as opposed to extremist or criminal groups. Four years ago, the percentages were reversed. “Anecdotally, there seems to be a dramatic increase in states taking hostages,” Dani Gilbert, a professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy who researches hostage policy, told me. “The terminology that I would use for that is ‘hostage diplomacy.’ It’s essentially states holding foreigners hostage under the guise of law to achieve foreign-policy outcomes.”
This shift emerged during Obama’s second term and accelerated during the Trump Administration. Trump, more than his predecessors, made concessions to authoritarian leaders—for example, granting Egypt’s dictator a White House meeting seemingly in exchange for the release of the aid worker Aya Hijazi. He touted the release of imprisoned Americans as proof of his prowess as a negotiator, and held photo opportunities with them when they returned home. The families of many hostages welcomed Trump’s willingness to push the bounds of the no-concessions policy, but a President’s personal involvement in hostage cases creates risks. Rob Saale, a former F.B.I. special agent who led an interagency task force put together by Obama to bring hostages home, told me that Trump’s zealous pursuit of photo ops with returning hostages increased their perceived political value and made U.S. citizens more likely to be abducted by regimes seeking ways to pressure the U.S. government. “Trump put a target on the back of every American abroad,” Saale told me.
Thousands of Americans are arrested each year in foreign countries, many of them for petty crimes such as public drunkenness. A small number of these detentions, those that the State Department deems politically motivated, are designated “wrongful” under the Levinson Act, a 2020 law named after Robert Levinson, a former F.B.I. agent who was secretly held in Iran for roughly thirteen years and died in custody. Within a few weeks of his arrest, Fenster’s case was referred to Carstens, who was appointed the Presidential envoy for hostage affairs by Trump and is one of a few holdovers to the Biden Administration. Carstens had been following the case since Fenster’s arrest, and had already spoken with his family in Detroit. The Fensters were entering a maddening world where basic information is scarce and advice is often contradictory for the families of captives.
Bryan Fenster, Danny’s brother, learned about the arrest in a string of text messages from Silva, who remained in Myanmar. Bryan stopped working for six months and became the public face of the Fensters’ response in the U.S. Initially, the family, like those of many hostages, tried to generate public support through media interviews and posts online. The family adopted #BringDannyHome as a hashtag after deciding that their first choice, #FreeFenster, was too confrontational for thin-skinned members of the Myanmar junta. Bryan, along with his parents—Rose, a nurse, and Buddy, who had recently retired from his job as a health-care worker—also sought the help of press-freedom organizations. (At the time, Bryan consulted with me in my previous role as the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.) The generals holding Fenster again responded with silence. “We were drowning and looking for debris to hold onto,” Bryan recalled.
The U.S. Embassy initially held a weekly call with the Fensters to update them on the case and their efforts, but there was little news to share. The Biden Administration had no formal diplomatic relations with the new government, which meant that there were few sources of leverage. In the wake of the coup, the U.S. had isolated the military regime, rebuked it publicly, and imposed sanctions, but those steps seemed to have had limited effect on its behavior. In June, Carstens and his team visited the Fensters in Detroit, a form of government engagement that the family welcomed. “He was great,” Bryan said of Carstens. “He made us feel like they cared.”
After Danny’s arrest, Bryan also received a call from Mickey Bergman, the executive director of the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, run by Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Since leaving government, Richardson had made negotiating with repressive regimes for the release of captive Americans his specialty. Working as a private citizen, he had more latitude and flexibility than the government. Families, though, were unsure how much to trust Richardson, and U.S. officials were sometimes leery of his brand of private diplomacy.
Owing to his past work as a diplomat, Richardson had unusual standing in Myanmar. He had a long personal friendship with Aung San Suu Kyi but had criticized her defense of a scorched-earth campaign that the Burmese military had launched against the country’s Rohingya ethnic minority. Despite his implicit condemnation of the military itself, Richardson’s break with the deposed leader apparently made him attractive to the junta.
Tensions emerged between Richardson’s effort to free Fenster and the U.S. government’s. The regime’s foreign minister invited Richardson to the capital, Naypyidaw, for a discussion on humanitarian aid and COVID vaccines. The State Department expressed concern about the timing of the trip, likely because a visit could undermine U.S. efforts to isolate the regime. Richardson made plans to travel to Myanmar in early November. U.S. officials asked Richardson not to raise Fenster’s case with military leaders, out of concerns that the junta might use Richardson to make demands on the U.S. government.
Bergman called Bryan Fenster to let him know that the November trip to Myanmar was going ahead but that the State Department had asked Richardson not to bring up Danny’s case. Bryan, who was working his own separate channel to reach the junta, told Bergman he agreed with the State Department’s position. Bergman hinted that, if an opportunity arose to bring Danny home, Richardson would not leave him behind. Bryan didn’t make much of the comment, assuming that Richardson would follow the State Department’s instructions.
The Richardson team arrived in Naypyidaw on November 1st, and by then Danny Fenster had been languishing in his cell for five months. He was held alone, sleeping on a wooden pallet. Breakfast was a watery bean broth with rice served from a bucket. After the door clanged open, at 7 A.M., he was free to mingle with the other inmates who shared his cell block or to exercise in a small courtyard, which he did by running figure eights or lifting concrete weights. Dinner, served around three-thirty, following an afternoon lockdown, was the same bean stew, a piece of chicken, or a few hard-boiled eggs. Fenster spoke to his family periodically, but mostly kept up his spirits by reading. He awoke each morning before dawn so that he could read undisturbed for several hours before the guards arrived.
In the beginning of his captivity, Fenster, communicating via his lawyer, asked Silva to include specific books in the regular care packages that she was able to send him. She often had to order them from Japan or Thailand, a process that took several weeks. Fenster devoured Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” and Tara Westover’s “Educated,” but it was David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” that made a powerful impression on him. He read it with a pen in his hand, scribbling notes in the margins whenever he found parallels with Buddhist philosophy and its message that suffering is bearable because it lasts just an instant. “It’s only when you think about the future, and how long it will be, that it becomes intolerable,” Fenster recalled thinking. This outlook sustained him for the first few months, but as the weeks dragged on he grew depressed. I’m never going to leave this little square, with this little garden, and this little court, he thought.
Richardson and his team had two days of talks with ministers from the military government, and they kept the conversation focussed on humanitarian assistance. The meetings, captured by a government photographer, took place in a gilded hall inside the Presidential palace. As the end of the visit approached, Richardson asked to meet alone with the junta leader, General Min Aung Hlaing. For the first few minutes, the two men chatted with the help of a translator. Richardson requested the release of a Burmese former employee of the Richardson Center named Aye Moe. The general responded positively. Richardson then ignored the State Department’s instructions and brought up Fenster’s case. The general said that securing the American journalist’s release would take time and that he would need Richardson to return to Myanmar. When Richardson was later asked by a reporter if Fenster had come up, he dodged the question, saying only that the State Department had asked him not to raise the issue.
Photos of Richardson meeting with Min Aung Hlaing were widely published by state-controlled media. Human-rights groups and the members of Myanmar’s opposition accused Richardson of making it possible for the generals to mislead the country’s population by claiming that the regime was less isolated. “Looks like Gov Bill Richardson did zilch, zero nothing for human rights in Myanmar while giving a propaganda win to Burma’s nasty, rights abusing military junta,” Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, tweeted. “Pathetic.” Richardson was also accused of leaving Fenster behind. That criticism intensified on November 12th, when a Burmese judge convicted him on multiple charges and sentenced Fenster to eleven years in prison. The ruling was devastating. “I was going back to prison and being processed as a convict instead of a detainee on trial,” Fenster recalled. “I started to really worry.” Silva, who was waiting outside the prison and hoping for her husband’s release, heard the news from their lawyer and was shaken as well. “That was a very hard day,” she told me. “I sent a message back to Danny with his lawyer and told him to try his best, to be well, and that it would end eventually.”
On the day after Fenster’s sentencing, prison officials gave him a COVID test and locked him in his cell, telling him he was in quarantine. The other prisoners, who spoke to Fenster through the metal bars of his cell, insisted that this was good news, and that he would soon be sent home. After so much false hope, he refused to believe them, even when prison officials told him to pack a bag. Fenster, shackled, was transported by car to Naypyidaw, where he waited in a local police station. Officers there told him not to ask questions. Taken to the airport, he again waited with police in a small room. Several hours after leaving the prison, police escorted him into the terminal and handed him over to a group of Westerners in suits. “Do you know who I am?” one of them asked. Fenster had no idea. “I’m Bill Richardson, and I’m the one who got you out of here.”
The sentencing had been a prelude to a pardon and release—a way for the junta to save face and not appear to succumb to American pressure. As they boarded a private jet, Bergman handed Danny a cell phone so that he could call his brother. “I was, like, I love you, thank you so much, I’m coming home,” Danny recalled. After a stop in Qatar, the group landed in New York, on November 16th, and Richardson held a press conference at Kennedy airport. Fenster, Bergman, Carstens, and Congressman Andy Levin, of Michigan, who had worked closely with the Fenster family, all participated. (I also spoke at the press conference, in my capacity as the then head of the C.P.J.) Bryan, Rose, and Buddy Fenster attended, along with Bryan’s wife, Cara, and her sister Andrea, but none of them spoke. (Silva was still in Yangon.) Fenster thanked Richardson for his efforts. “I’m incredibly grateful to Bill and his team,” he said. He described his surprise meeting with Richardson at the airport as “the greatest feeling I can ever remember having.” Days later, Silva landed in Detroit, in time to sit down with the Fenster family for her first Thanksgiving dinner.
The show of unity at the press conference masked divisions in the Biden Administration about the best approach to state hostage-taking. As in past Administrations, deep disagreements remained regarding how to support families without compromising on policies. Although families generally welcome private diplomatic efforts like Richardson’s, government officials are conflicted, recognizing their value, but also concerned about their own loss of control. (Richardson was one of the men named in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Virginia Giuffre, one of the women who said that Epstein sexually abused her as a minor, claimed in a deposition that she was told to have sex with Richardson. He has said that he never met Giuffre and called the allegation “completely false.”)
Even if the junta got nothing specific in exchange for Fenster’s release, it had gained a political benefit. By holding Fenster for six months in the face of enormous U.S. pressure, it was able to demonstrate both to internal opposition and to the world that it was prepared to stand up to the United States.
Dozens of other Americans are still being held unlawfully or unjustly in prisons around the world. In some instances, governments have made the release of detained Americans a condition of prisoner swaps, sanctions relief, or other policy concessions. Current American prisoners include the “Citgo 6,” a half-dozen oil executives jailed in Venezuela; four men held in Iran; Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, who are being unjustly detained in Russia; and Austin Tice, a journalist apprehended a decade ago in Syria, who is believed to be under the control of the Assad regime. The Taliban, which kidnapped a U.S. contractor named Mark Frerichs in 2020, have said that it will release him in exchange for the convicted drug trafficker Bashir Noorzai, who has been held in U.S. federal prison for more than sixteen years. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Taliban have been detaining a U.S. citizen and a U.S. permanent resident in Kabul since December.
The families of American hostages have grown more organized in recent years and have pushed the Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations to do more to win the release of their loved ones. Many were encouraged when Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with some of them in the first weeks of the Administration and promised that bringing American hostages home would be a “top priority.” But they say they are not seeing the action and results needed. Elizabeth Whelan, Paul Whelan’s sister, said that the government should designate wrongful detentions more quickly, provide financial support to the families, and adopt a more aggressive approach to bringing Americans home. Peter Bergen, an expert on terrorism at New America, said that U.S. hostage policies developed during the war on terror must be completely revamped to address states that take American hostages as a means of influencing U.S. policy. “The whole structure needs to be rethought,” he said.
The challenge that the U.S. government faces when an American is taken as a diplomatic hostage is that it often must negotiate with a government it does not recognize or one with which its relations are fraught. Officials must also somehow provide a concession that is sufficient to allow a hard-line regime to save face yet modest enough not to compromise American strategic interests or encourage further abductions. The needle-threading nature of hostage diplomacy has opened the door for individuals like Richardson, who, as a former U.S. official, can give the patina of legitimacy that isolated authoritarians crave—a photo op that is a simulacrum of a government meeting—without implicating U.S. officials.
After spending two months with Fenster’s family, Danny and Silva recently flew to Brasília, where they plan to spend a few months before heading back to the U.S. Fenster believes that Americans will continue to be unjustly imprisoned and must understand that there will be no tank crashing through the gates. If they’re lucky, a private diplomatic effort like Richardson’s might succeed. “It’s just the nature of the world,” Fenster said. “There are bad actors. Sometimes the most powerful government in the world can’t do anything.”
California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger is a frontrunner to replace Justice Stephen Breyer. (photo: Lonnie Tague/DoJ/Wikimedia Commons)
Ketanji Brown Jackson and Leondra Kruger were evaluated last year, but J Michelle Childs has become a third candidate
For Biden, it’s a tantalizing prospect. The president believes he was elected to try to bring the country together following the yawning and rancorous political divide that grew during the Trump administration and especially following the Capitol insurrection in January 2021.
This story is based on accounts from seven people familiar with Biden’s decision-making who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity to talk about private discussions.
Two of the three judges now on Biden’s short list were evaluated last year by White House aides, although that early vetting did not include deep dives into their opinions or backgrounds, formal interviews or FBI background checks.
They are Ketanji Brown Jackson, 51, a recent appointee to the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, where she has served since June 2021, and Leondra Kruger, 45, a California supreme court judge since 2015 who would be the first person in more than 40 years to move from a state court to the supreme court if she were to be confirmed.
Jackson is seen as the top candidate. And she, too, has a proven record of bipartisan support: she was confirmed to the appeals court on a 53-44 vote. Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina voted for her.
But J Michelle Childs has rapidly become a serious third candidate after the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn, publicly announced his support for her, as did the state’s Republican senators, Graham and Tim Scott. Graham has made clear Childs is his preferred choice.
The 55-year-old is a federal judge in South Carolina who has been nominated to serve on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. That nomination is on hold while she’s under consideration for the high court.
Childs lacks the elite law school credentials of many current Supreme Court justices – she attended the University of South Carolina School of Law. But that’s part of her appeal to Clyburn and others who question why Ivy League credentials are necessary.
Among the three justices on Biden’s short list, Childs is considered the most moderate, and she has been criticized by progressives and labor groups who say her record is not sufficiently supportive of worker rights. She was previously a state court judge and has served as a federal trial court judge since 2010.
Jackson did attend Harvard Law School and has expertise that would bring considerable professional diversity to the high court. She worked as a public defender and served on the US Sentencing Commission before she was nominated to the federal bench by former president Barack Obama. She is the favorite of progressives.
Kruger, 45, has been on the California supreme court since 2015. She was just 38 when chosen for the job by then governor Jerry Brown. She’s seen as a moderate on the seven-member court. She used to work for the Department of Justice.
Breyer’s replacement won’t shift the ideological makeup of the court. So in some ways, that makes it easier for Republicans to back a candidate advanced by Biden. But Biden has also said bipartisan support is not a necessity; a razor-thin majority in the US Senate means he doesn’t need it.
Biden, who is spending the weekend at Camp David, is studying a range of cases and other materials about the candidates, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said Friday.
Psaki said Biden could begin meeting with top contenders as early as next week, noting that such interviews typically happen at the end of the vetting process. She said the president remains on track for an announcement by the end of the month.
Going back as far as his campaign, Biden has pledged to nominate a Black woman for the slot. The supreme court was made up entirely of white men for almost two centuries.
Afghan youth from Kunduz bathe while waiting with other recently arrived migrants to board a ferry to Athens from Mytilene, Greece on October 16, 2015. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
A veteran war reporter goes undercover to document a world where movement is surveilled, curtailed, and criminalized.
Some reporters can’t help telling you their latest tale of derring-do: “I was there. And it was hell!” I’d infrequently run into Aikins somewhere, but the Canadian journalist would never say much about what he had just done or where he was headed. Then my next issue of Harper’s would arrive, and I’d see “On the Front Lines in the World’s Deadliest Megacity” above his name.
But I didn’t really know how brave Aikins was until, a third of the way through his debut book, he admits: “I was in danger of losing the plot.” I felt the same. It seemed as if “The Naked Don’t Fear the Water” (a title borrowed from a Dari proverb) might be going off the rails.
For years, Aikins — a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone — had worked alongside his friend “Omar” (a pseudonym), a former interpreter for U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. Like millions of other Afghans ground down by war and want, Omar eventually resolves to make the long, dangerous journey to Europe. It was a readymade story. “If Omar was going to travel that way, then I wanted to go with him and write about it,” Aikins tells us. “Given the risk of being arrested, I’d have to disguise myself as a fellow Afghan migrant. … This way I could see the refugee underground from the inside.”
You see where this is going, right? Some sort of modern-day “On the Road” meets “Down and Out in Paris and London,” but a work of nonfiction with a war and refugee crisis angle. (If anyone left in publishing remembers Kerouac and Orwell, they probably described the proposal for “The Naked Don’t Fear the Water” this way.) And I was ready for that book to launch on page one. But then Omar doesn’t leave Kabul — or Laila, the woman he wants to marry but barely knows — for almost a year. And when Aikins (traveling undercover as “Habib”) and Omar finally do hit the smuggler’s road to Europe, it’s all false starts and stillborn plans. They’re going to fly to Istanbul. No wait, they’re going to skirt the Dasht-e Margo (“Desert of Death”) and travel through Balochistan — in the treacherous borderlands of Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan — by truck. But now Omar is afraid to take the Pakistani route to Iran. A hundred pages in, Aikins and Omar are on a bus back to Kabul. “This trip with Omar had gotten so screwed up that I didn’t understand what I was doing anymore,” Aikins admits. Should I even tell you that, as the book comes to a close, Aikins is actually questioning his choice of Omar as a protagonist?
But it turns out that I shouldn’t have worried — and you needn’t either. It’s in those busted schemes, the countless failed plans, and Aikins’s effort to shed his identity, strip off his clothes, and wade across the Rezovo river out of Europe (Bulgaria) and into a country (Turkey) that had just barred him from entering due to vague suspicions about his passport and of journalists more generally, that the heart of the story emerges. Not just Aikins’s finely crafted tale — an intimate and empathic portrait of friendship, shared sacrifice, and the absurdities of borders on an arbitrarily divided planet — but one of the biggest stories of our time: how the mass migration of people persists in a world where movement is surveilled, curtailed, and criminalized; where the ancient problems of rough seas and searing heat have been compounded by a devious dance between uncaring governments and criminal syndicates that compounds risks and transforms travel that might once have been merely difficult into a potentially lethal endeavor.
Since the U.S. invasion of their country in 2001, Omar and almost 6 million fellow Afghans have been either internally displaced or become refugees. Worse yet, between 38 million and 60 million people in Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, as well as Afghanistan, have been forced from their homes, either abroad or within their own countries, due to the U.S. war on terror, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. To put it in perspective, even the low-end estimate exceeds those displaced by every conflict since 1900, except for the cataclysm of World War II.
For years, this ongoing catastrophe has intermittently garnered headlines only to inevitably recede from the world’s front pages. The crisis reached its greatest prominence seven years ago, when a photo of the tiny, lifeless body of 2-year-old Alan Kurdi, face down on a Turkish beach, shocked the conscience of the globe and, according to the New York Times, “became a worldwide symbol of the suffering caused by the Syrian war and the European refugee crisis it triggered.” Leaving aside that “European refugee crisis” made it sound as if the refugees were European (they weren’t); as if Europe were the aggrieved party (it wasn’t); and as if the conflict in Syria were the only war that forced people from their homes (it wasn’t), Alan Kurdi was just one of an astounding 65.3 million people forcibly displaced worldwide due to war, persecution, general violence, or human rights violations in 2015.
Since then, things have gotten much worse. Between last year’s coverage of Covid-19, a cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal, and robber barons being shot into space, you might have missed that the number of forcibly displaced people ballooned to 84 million — and that 2.6 million of them, the third-highest total by country, were Afghans.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around 84 million people, roughly the combined populations of Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania, the equivalent of 1 in every 95 people on this planet. Add those driven across borders by economic desperation and the numbers turn truly astronomical. One in 30 people on Earth is a migrant, meaning that more than 1 billion people are now on the move around the globe. Many exist on the margins of society: imperiled, imprisoned, their lives stuck in neutral, their dreams clipped and crippled. And they’re joined each day by additional travelers on what Bob Dylan called the “unarmed road of flight.”
On that road with Aikins and Omar, you see these people up close, the dangers they face, the setbacks they overcome — or don’t. Will Omar ever see Laila again? Will the rest of Omar’s family, having fled Afghanistan for Turkey, make it to Europe? Will Aikins be left to care for 11-year-old Raja when the boy’s cousin, another Afghan refugee, is arrested trying to flee a Greek refugee camp for the capital Athens?
In addition to crafting a riveting and suspenseful tale, Aikins displays a keen eye for detail and a gift for painting vivid scenes, like his crossing from Turkey to Greece in an overloaded dinghy. “A curly-haired little Iraqi girl was sitting with her parents on the floor in front of me. As the swells grew rougher, her head kept knocking into my knee, so I reached out and cradled her head,” he writes. “It was too dark to see the other passengers’ faces clearly, but as I listened to their whimpers and groans, I became aware of the utter terror that surrounded me.”
It’s that omnipresent fear, the powerful stories embedded within the main narrative — those of the Iraqi girl and all the other refugees and migrants, the people-smugglers and police, the activists and aid workers — that form the sinews of “The Naked Don’t Fear the Water” and tell the larger story of war and globalization, the migration crisis, and the suffering and resilience of tens of millions who are largely ignored by the lucky inhabitants of the affluent West.
Aikins was able to make this journey for some of the same reasons he was such an effective reporter in Afghanistan. Many foreign correspondents try and fail to blend into the background of the places they cover, but Aikins’s European-Canadian father and Asian American mother gifted him a rare asset for a Western reporter in Afghanistan: looks that Afghans took for those of a fellow countryman. That genetic luck, combined with formidable language skills, cultural acumen, local dress, and — another must for a reporter — knowing when to keep quiet, allowed Aikins not only unique “undercover” access to the story, but they also made him a central part of it. As he navigates the refugee underground, Aikins offers a kaleidoscopic view of fragmented families and dispossessed people trying and failing and scheming and planning and hoping and praying to complete the next leg of their journey — of refugees in desperate circumstances, making impossible choices based on rumors and hunches and advice from people they barely know, taking outrageous risks because they have no other options.
Sardar, who used the same smuggler as Aikins, paid extra for a speedboat passage to Greece only to be thwarted and thrown into a detention camp. For his next try, he, along with his wife and her kid brother, who had only just completed the overland journey from Afghanistan to Turkey, hoped to make it to Italy in a shipping container. Yousef and another Syrian hand over 2000 euros each to a Pakistani smuggler to guide them through the Balkans, only to be abandoned in the frigid mountains of Macedonia. A police patrol likely saves their lives, but the arrest lands them in a filthy cell for two weeks, after which Macedonian authorities dump them on a deserted stretch of the Serbian border and force them to cross. Broke and homeless, Yousef texts Omar: “Whatever you do, don’t come this way.” But what does it matter? “This way,” Aikins’s book makes clear, is likely as bad as that way, unless you have — in addition to plenty of guts and grit — enough money and luck to neutralize the danger.
“Like war,” Aikins explains, “life on the smuggler’s road was mostly waiting punctuated by moments of terror.” Aikins should know. He’s been breaking big stories about America’s wars since the 2000s, none larger than last year’s investigation for the Times of an August drone attack in Kabul that killed 10 civilians, seven of them children. That reporting helped force U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to acknowledge the attack had been a “horrible mistake.” But the Pentagon and the American people have not, and likely never will, take responsibility for the 6 million Afghans like Omar who fled their homes during the American war and the millions more displaced around the globe by the war on terror.
“The Naked Don’t Fear the Water” is a powerful reminder that for many, the rigors of traversing borders involve far more than long lines or removing your shoes. “Imagine,” writes Aikins, “the cities of the world connected by a network of paths that measure not physical distance but danger: the risk of getting arrested, stuck in transit, scammed, kidnapped or killed.”
The fates of millions on those paths will be determined by punitive policies, the vagaries of dumb luck, and the boredom of border cops. Unique, gripping, and beautifully written, “The Naked Don’t Fear the Water” offers an intimate view of these dangerous global byways, the intrepid who travel them, and the dreams they’ll risk everything to realize.
Former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson, center, joins Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, left, and Chuck Schumer, after Congress gave final approval to legislation guaranteeing people who experience sexual harassment at work can seek recourse in the courts. (photo: J Scott Applewhite/AP)
The big picture: Don't expect companies to abandon this practice — widely criticized for favoring employers, and for depriving workers and consumers of their right to a jury trial. The bill, which President Biden is expected to sign, leaves a lot out.
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Why it matters: Thing is, the legislation is a big deal — the first significant Congressional action stemming from the MeToo movement, as Sophia Cai and I reported. But it's also not a big deal: It only covers sexual harassment and sexual assault cases.
- Companies send all kinds of matters to these secretive courts — including civil rights claims like race discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, and wage theft.
- A separate bill that would ban more types of cases from forced arbitration didn't have a chance with Republicans, who only supported the narrower bill.
"I expect corporations to continue to use forced arbitration against their workers anytime they can," said Julia Duncan, senior director of government affairs at the American Association for Justice, a trial lawyer group.
How it works: Simply put, companies use private arbitration to stay out of the public court system. That keeps these cases — often public relations nightmares — out of the public's view and away from sympathetic juries.
- Typically, clauses prohibit employers or customers from joining together in class actions, which discourages individuals from even coming forward with complaints.
- Many workers don't even know they agreed to forced arbitration, since it's often baked into employment contracts.
- You'll also find these agreements buried in the fine print of your credit card paperwork, cell phone contract, student loan documents, more.
State of play: More than half of nonunion, private sector employees — or about 60 million workers — were subject to mandatory arbitration as of a 2018 report from the progressive Economic Policy Institute.
Most cases never even make it in front of an arbitrator. If the cases do, employers are more likely to win, according to widely cited research. For two big reasons:
- The discovery process is far more constrained than in public court, so plaintiffs have less ability to gather evidence.
- Cases are heard by arbitrators who are often retired lawyers who've spent their careers defending employers. They're hired by the two main private arbitration companies, which are paid by employers (repeat customers) for their services. (These companies say the process is unbiased.)
- Damages are typically lower, so employees aren't able to always find a lawyer working on retainer to represent them — and so can't afford the process.
The impact: For years women and men who've been harassed at work, and complained about it, were silenced by this process, Gretchen Carlson, widely credited for pushing this legislation through, told Axios earlier this week.
- The new law should bring these stories to light, allow harassment victims to seek justice and force companies to figure out ways to keep such behaviors from flourishing.
- "That’s what we have been fighting for. The injustice men and women faced by not having the choice of making their case public," Carlson said.
The other side: In a letter to lawmakers last fall, the Chamber of Commerce argued that "arbitration is a fair, effective, and less expensive means of resolving disputes."
My thought bubble: Advocates and Democratic lawmakers say this is the first step of a process that would end forced arbitration in other realms — but it took decades for this one narrow law to finally make it through. Don't hold your breath.
Jaz Brisack decorated her Buffalo apartment with furniture from Goodwill. (photo: Libby March/WP)
The worried, angry and exhausted workers who remained had asked Starbucks for KN95 masks, better protocols to inform them when co-workers tested positive for the coronavirus, and the right to deny service to customers who refused to comply with their county’s mask mandate.
Their concerns were no different from those of many of the other 383,000 Starbucks employees stuck laboring through the latest wave of the pandemic. The Elmwood baristas, though, believed that they had leverage that others lacked.
Three weeks earlier, they had voted to become the first unionized Starbucks in the country, an improbable victory that overcame stiff resistance from the coffee giant and caught the attention of baristas in Boston, Chicago, Knoxville, Seattle and Baltimore, who were requesting their own votes, just like the one in Buffalo. Congratulations were pouring in from the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former labor secretary Robert Reich, who called their win “a watershed for the biggest coffee seller in the world” and “a small step on the long trail toward rebalancing such power in America.”
With the virus tearing through their workforce, the baristas were ready to make their demands. Michelle Eisen, an 11-year veteran of the company, called their requests the “bare minimum” Starbucks could do to keep them safe. Starbucks executives countered that the measures in place at their store and all of the others in the massive chain exceeded the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They weren’t going to treat Elmwood differently.
So on a Wednesday morning in early January, just hours after another worker from the store fell ill, the Elmwood baristas decided to go on strike. There were a few whispered conversations as the baristas checked to make sure everyone was on board. A 24-year-old barista named Jaz Brisack, who had been off that morning, rushed in to pick up a shift so that she could walk out with her co-workers.
A little before 8:30 a.m., they strode quietly past the store’s glass pastry case, boxes of vanilla bean powder and an industrial-size ice machine to the storage room where an unsuspecting manager was working.
“Are you all okay?” she asked.
“We’re really not,” Eisen replied.
The baristas were taking off their green aprons. Eisen was listing the names of the workers from the store who had recently fallen ill and laying out the reasoning behind the walkout.
“Is there anything I can do?” the manager asked.
“It’s really not on you,” Eisen replied. “We had a conversation with corporate yesterday. These things could’ve been resolved, and they said that this was ‘adequate,’ and it’s not.” She turned to leave, and the other workers, who were putting on their hats, coats, scarves and backpacks, followed her. A pop song was playing on the coffee shop’s sound system.
“Please clock out!” the manager called out to them as if it were just another day at work.
“No, let’s go! Don’t clock out,” Eisen told the baristas who didn’t break stride as they stepped onto the sidewalk, where they would eventually start a picket line and learn just how much they would be able to shift the balance of power inside one of America’s largest corporations.
A big reason baristas were standing outside on that frigid Buffalo morning was because a year earlier, Brisack, fresh off a Rhodes Scholarship, had walked into the Elmwood Starbucks and applied for a job.
For the next eight months, she learned to froth lattes and blend Frappuccinos. She rose before sunrise to help open her store and picked up shifts at other Buffalo Starbucks where she met other baristas who told her about their lives, frustrations and concerns with the company. And she waited.
Brisack had been working toward this moment since she was a home-schooled teenager in Alcoa, Tenn., and read a speech delivered by the legendary American socialist Eugene Debs that hit her with the power of a revelation.
“While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” Debs told a jury that was about to convict him of inciting resistance to the draft during World War I.
“It was so radical,” Brisack said. “So, in your face.”
Debs’s words sparked an obsession with the great labor battles of the early 1900s — violent tales of avarice, betrayal and sacrifice — and propelled her to a full scholarship at the University of Mississippi, a part-time job on a failed campaign to unionize a Nissan plant and, finally, a Rhodes Scholarship. She was the first woman in University of Mississippi history to win the coveted prize.
The summer before Brisack left for Britain, Richard Bensinger, a lead organizer on the Nissan campaign, invited her to come to Buffalo, where he was working on several campaigns, including one to organize a small, locally owned coffee chain.
Brisack raced unhappily through her Rhodes in a year — instead of the normal two — and returned to Buffalo, where she landed the Starbucks job.
“Just because you’re working there doesn’t mean I’m going to try to organize it,” Bensinger recalled telling her. Taking on Starbucks was a massive project that could quickly consume the resources of the tiny Upstate New York union office where the 71-year-old organizer was working.
By late July, Brisack felt she had proved herself a reliable worker. A labor shortage was putting pressure on baristas across Buffalo. “It’s now or never,” she recalled thinking. She invited a friend from her store over to crochet. A bag of yarn sat on the table. Brisack mixed some Old-Fashioneds.
Before they started, she told her friend, Cassie Fleischer, 25, that she had a question that she had been wanting to ask her: one that could put their jobs at risk and, for the moment, had to remain secret. Brisack tapped her finger nervously against her glass. She could feel her heart beating in her chest.
“How do you feel about organizing a union at Starbucks?” she asked. She had picked Fleischer for this first conversation because she knew she could trust her and because she had noticed that her friend had shared messages on Facebook about the impossibility of surviving on the minimum wage.
“Is that even possible?” Fleischer replied. “Starbucks is so huge.”
Brisack began speaking of the need for better pay, more generous benefits, more consistent scheduling and a fairer promotion system. Fleischer, who had been with Starbucks for almost five years, felt a bit ambushed and confused.
“So, do you want to learn how to crochet?” she finally interrupted.
Fleischer had barely made it home that evening when her phone pinged with a 500-word text message.
“Thank you so much for the crochet lesson and your patience with me!” Brisack wrote. “I think unionizing will mean that we will have our own voice and real power. … Right now, Starbucks has all the power and ultimately is supposed to hold themselves accountable. If we had a union, we would be able to hold them accountable and they would have to recognize us as equals.”
In the days that followed, Brisack began contacting other baristas at her store and the 19 other Buffalo Starbucks. Secrecy was paramount. In 2019, Starbucks had fired two Philadelphia baristas who were trying to unionize their stores, killing the effort before it had even started and drawing a rebuke from a National Labor Relations Board judge who ruled the company had violated the workers’ rights.
Brisack focused her initial search on baristas who had championed liberal causes on a group chat that Starbucks’s Buffalo employees used to promote events or find fill-ins when they couldn’t work their normal shifts.
“Just wanted to see if you’re available to meet up soon to talk about activism in Buffalo,” she wrote to a barista who earlier in the year had organized a demonstration against sexual assault at a local college. One of the five protesters there was Brisack.
A few days later, Brisack and another early union supporter raced out to a nightclub to track down two baristas who moonlighted as drag queen performers. She finally caught up with them around 3 a.m., pitched them on the union and then dashed home to grab some food before starting her 5 a.m. shift.
Often one pro-union barista led Brisack to others. Most of the people with whom she met were in their mid-20s; many were the first in their families to attend college and were saddled with five- and six-figure student loan debts. Some had parents who had struggled with addiction or had served time in prison.
Brisack introduced as many as she could to Bensinger. She wanted to show the baristas that she had a real union backing her, and she wanted to convince Bensinger that they could win.
Among the last people Brisack contacted was Eisen, the 11-year Starbucks veteran from her Elmwood store. Brisack didn’t know Eisen well; they typically worked different days. And Eisen’s long history with the company suggested that she might not support the big changes that a union could bring.
But the pandemic had changed Eisen’s view of Starbucks, which had thrived by selling normalcy. Even if the world was upside down, Eisen’s regulars could still count on their caramel macchiato.
Eisen’s life, though, felt anything but normal. She also worked as a stage manager for a local theater and depended on Starbucks for health insurance. When the pandemic struck, her theater shut down and Starbucks became her full-time job. She was making a little less than $16 an hour, $1 an hour more than the minimum wage for New York state fast-food workers and barely enough to pay her bills. The stress of it all had taken a toll on her mental health.
Brisack took her to meet Bensinger. At 38, Eisen was older than most of the other baristas, even-keeled and smart. Younger workers often turned to her for career and life advice. Bensinger quickly pegged her as just the sort of person the union needed to take a high-profile leadership role once the campaign launched.
“How public are you willing to be?” he asked Eisen.
“As public as you need me to be,” she replied.
In late August, 49 baristas from across Buffalo sent a letter to Starbucks’s chief executive in Seattle informing him that they were seeking to form a union. To petition the NLRB for a vote, a store needed at least 30 percent of the workers to sign union cards. The union decided to start by requesting votes at three Buffalo-area Starbucks where a large majority of baristas had signed cards, knowing that a strong anti-union campaign from Starbucks would persuade some of the early signers to change sides.
Among the most pro-union stores was Elmwood.
After her initial awkward conversation with Brisack, Fleischer had tried to forget about the union drive. She waited four days before she responded to Brisack’s long text, writing back that making demands of the company felt disloyal and “wrong.” Three weeks later when the campaign went public, she declined to sign a union card.
To Fleischer, it seemed as if everyone had a hidden agenda. She had trained Brisack to be a barista and recalled her during those early days as earnest, eager to learn and prone to apologizing far too much. Fleischer hadn’t been able to find her new friend on Facebook, so she had googled her and discovered that Brisack had won a prestigious scholarship in Britain. Fleischer had never heard of the Rhodes scholarship, but her mother was familiar with it. “Oh, my God, your friend is smart as s---,” Fleischer’s mother had said.
Fleischer had initially assumed that Brisack was working as a barista because she needed a break. Now she wondered whether Brisack had been part of some “secret plot” to unionize the coffee giant.
Starbucks also seemed to be less than truthful. It flooded the Buffalo market — and Fleischer’s Elmwood store — with “support managers” from around the country who worked alongside the baristas. The company said the multimillion-dollar campaign was designed to fix a market in crisis: stores that were understaffed, dirty and struggling with insect infestations. But it seemed to Fleischer that the “support managers” were also there to intimidate and spy on union supporters.
Every few weeks, the company summoned Fleischer and the other Buffalo baristas to mandatory meetings designed to undermine support for the union. The presentations warned that Workers United — the larger union with which the baristas were hoping to affiliate — was losing members and raising its dues, which the company said could cost baristas as much as $600 a year. “I need that $600,” Fleischer said she thought. “That’s a month’s rent.”
Sometimes she surprised herself with her long-suppressed grievances and her assertiveness. In one meeting she told Rossann Williams, who oversees all of Starbucks’s North American stores, that the company’s approach to taking time off for mental health, which required baristas to find someone to cover missed shifts, was “unacceptable.”
“I can’t believe I said that,” she told Brisack after the meeting.
“But it is unacceptable,” Brisack replied. “And that’s why you need to be on our store’s bargaining committee when we win.”
In November, just days before the ballots were mailed to the baristas, Fleischer filed into a hotel ballroom in downtown Buffalo for an hour-long address from Howard Schultz, the company’s founder. Schultz agreed to go to Buffalo after learning that Kevin Johnson, the company’s chief executive, hadn’t visited the city. Schultz’s trip was a sign of how badly some top executives and board members inside Starbucks wanted to stop the union drive. They worried that a successful organizing campaign could depress Starbucks’s stock price, that the union would make it harder to fire malingering employees or hurt relations between workers and their managers.
Schultz seemed to view the union campaign as a personal affront. He had stepped down as chief executive in 2018, but Starbucks was still very much the company that he had built over 30 years.
Clad in a gray cardigan and khakis, Schultz gazed out at hundreds of 20-somethings arrayed around him in the hotel ballroom. “I don’t want to give a speech. I don’t have any notes,” he told them. “I just want to speak from the heart about what I believe this company is about and what we’ve tried to do over these many years in building a different kind of company.”
Soon Schultz was speaking about his father who returned home from World War II and worked a series of “really tough, blue-collar jobs” in Brooklyn before he suffered an injury at work that left him “bitter and angry” and his family dependent on charity to survive. “I experienced at the age of seven the imprinting shame, the vulnerability, the embarrassment of a family that was really destitute,” Schultz said.
His goal at Starbucks, he continued, had been to “build the kind of company my father never got a chance to work for.”
As he was speaking, Fleischer was remembering her own struggles. She thought about her single mother, who had worked a $7.25-an-hour job at Wegmans and depended on federal aid to feed Fleischer and her brother. She thought about the Christmas when she was 8 and overheard her mother saying that they were on the verge of losing their house. She thought about how hard she worked to earn a bachelor’s degree in social work and how, despite all that hard work, she still carried $25,000 in student loan debt and qualified for Medicaid.
She had been poor her entire life, and it had never been a source of “shame” or embarrassment for her.
A few yards away, Schultz was talking about the “expensive” benefits he had provided to even his part-time baristas: a company health plan, a stock option program, free online college through Arizona State University, online mental health counseling. “Who forced us to do it? Who pushed us to do it? No one,” he repeated again and again and again.
Fleischer felt as if she was being “scolded by a parent” for her ingratitude. She started googling Schultz and found an article that said that he was worth more than $4 billion and no longer felt grateful at all. Now she was annoyed.
“If you have $4 billion, you should absolutely be providing these benefits to us,” she recalled thinking.
As soon as Schultz had finished speaking, a woman in a black leather jacket jumped up from her seat and strode toward him. “I am an organizing member of Starbucks Workers United, and I am a barista,” she shouted as she held aloft a copy of the union’s “fair elections principles,” which asked the coffee giant to give union backers equal time to make their case, and which the company had declined to endorse.
A Starbucks executive in a $500 down vest stepped in front of the young woman, blocking her path to the company founder. “Howard Schultz, please, if you care!” she yelled.
But Schultz had already slipped out the ballroom’s back door.
Four days later, Fleischer asked Eisen to meet to discuss the union. Her biggest worry was the extra $600 a year in union dues. Eisen assured her that any new contract would have to boost pay to cover the extra dues expense or it would be rejected by the union.
Fleischer said she hoped that she might someday be able to sit on her store’s bargaining committee, where she could press Starbucks executives to improve barista training and change the sick leave policy that she had complained was “unacceptable.” Later that afternoon, she texted Eisen that she was going to vote for the union.
“I AM really passionate about this job and company, and I want my voice to be heard,” she wrote. “I don’t know how else to make that happen. But if/WHEN we unionize, I want to be part of the change that comes from it.”
Brisack, Eisen and Fleischer locked arms, their eyes fixed on a live video of a NLRB lawyer who was counting the votes to determine whether their Starbucks on Elmwood Avenue would become the company’s first unionized U.S. store.
More than four months had passed since Brisack and Fleischer’s first conversation about the possibility of organizing a union. The lawyer slit open the first envelope. To win, the union needed at least 14 of the 27 employees on the store’s rolls to vote yes. Surrounding the three Elmwood baristas were several dozen Starbucks employees from across Buffalo.
The first seven votes were all “yeses.”
“Landslide!” one barista called out.
“Where’s Rossann?” yelled another, a reference to the head of Starbucks’s North America operations who had spent long stretches of the campaign in their Buffalo stores and had repeatedly urged the baristas to oppose the union.
Five consecutive no votes followed. “What’s happening?” Brisack whispered to Eisen who shut her eyes and squeezed Brisack’s left hand tight. Soon they were up to 13 “yes” votes. They needed just one more to go their way, and they would officially be a union. The NLRB lawyer opened the next ballot.
“Yes,” he read.
Brisack, Fleischer and Eisen clutched each other in a group hug, and Eisen started to cry. “Elmwood! Elmwood! Elmwood!” the baristas around them chanted.
The NLRB lawyer counted the votes at two more Buffalo Starbucks. One voted narrowly against joining the union, and a third store’s results remained inconclusive because of objections to some ballots that several weeks later were decided in the union’s favor.
“We’re incredibly excited to announce that we have won the first unionized Starbucks in U.S. history,” Eisen told a dozen reporters who had gathered at the union’s office in a converted factory where Buffalo laborers once manufactured World War II-era warplanes.
The reporters asked essentially the same question: What exactly did the baristas want from Starbucks? More affordable health insurance? More predictable hours? Better pay? “A new employee who starts today makes 63 cents less an hour than I do after 11 years,” Eisen said. “So, is that an issue? Sure.”
The reality, though, was that Eisen, Brisack and Fleischer wanted something bigger. In the first hours following the union’s victory, Eisen didn’t feel joy or relief. Rather, she felt “resentment and anger” at how hard Starbucks had fought to prevent their store and others from unionizing. The company had postponed the balloting for months with unsuccessful legal challenges and targeted pro-union baristas for the smallest slip-ups, such as minor dress-code infractions or accidental swearing. In the case of the store where votes were still in dispute, the union charged that Starbucks had attempted to dilute support by more than doubling the staff.
Eisen told the reporters that she wanted the company to stop fighting, sit down with them and “negotiate the best contract that the service industry has ever seen.”
Brisack stepped forward. “We’ve said from Day One that all we had to do was win one store,” she added. And now that they had won it, the Elmwood baristas expected Starbucks to recognize their new power.
Three weeks later, the Elmwood baristas went on strike. The day before they walked out, Brisack, Eisen and Fleischer took part in an emergency meeting with three Starbucks executives and a company lawyer to discuss the omicron outbreak that had sidelined 10 Elmwood staffers.
The sides talked in circles for nearly three hours. The baristas asked Starbucks to close their store for five days to stem the outbreak and give people time to return from isolation. When that request was rejected, they pushed for more robust protective equipment, such as KN95 masks. The Starbucks executives responded that they were “very confident” in their safety protocols and that there were enough healthy baristas at Elmwood to “meet the needs of the business.”
The next morning, around 5:45, a worker, who had gone to the emergency room just days earlier for a non-covid illness, told Eisen that he was too weak to finish his shift. He had come in, he said, only because he didn’t want to let down his co-workers when they were already missing so many people. Eisen drove him home and returned to the store.
“I’m about to walk out of this place,” one of the baristas complained to her.
“Let’s do it,” Eisen replied. “This is ridiculous.”
She quickly got assurances from the union that it would cover their lost pay and that Starbucks couldn’t fire them for striking. Then she quietly consulted with the other baristas — starting with Fleischer.
“Are you sure this is the move?” Fleischer asked nervously. “Is now the time?
“If we’re not going to walk out over our health and well-being, then there’s not anything worth walking out for,” Eisen said. Brisack woke to a series of texts about the walkout from Fleischer and raced down to the store to join them.
Soon they were all standing on the sidewalk and Eisen was texting the rest of the workers to let them know what had happened. The store, staffed by a manager and a shift supervisor, remained open for about 45 more minutes until the overwhelmed shift supervisor uttered an agreed-upon safe word — “Oklahoma” — and the manager locked the doors. The store stayed closed for two days before Starbucks reopened it with a mix of Elmwood workers who chose not to strike and other Starbucks personnel.
Brisack, Fleischer and Eisen spent the five days after the walkout on the sidewalk picketing alongside their co-workers.
Inside the store, a few of their overworked and frustrated colleagues struggled to serve the store’s customers. Fleischer tried not to make eye contact with them through the windows. To Fleischer, it was “kind of baffling” that the company hadn’t given them anything. Even their relatively small request that Starbucks pay their out-of-pocket costs on coronavirus tests was denied. “I was expecting them to do or say something,” she said.
She didn’t regret backing the union, which had given her a sense of mission and purpose. But she was starting to doubt that they would even be able to negotiate a pay raise big enough to offset their union dues. And she worried that it would be awkward when she and her fellow strikers eventually returned to work.
On Day 4 of their frigid, five-day protest, Fleischer worked up the courage to ask Brisack a question that had been weighing on her for months.
“Did you plan on all this happening when you started at Starbucks, or was it just a coincidence?” she asked.
Brisack replied that she hadn’t known whether it would be possible to unionize the coffee giant when she took the job at the Elmwood store. “I’d try to organize any place I worked, but this wasn’t a grand scheme,” she said. Without the union and, even more important, the support of other Buffalo baristas, there would have been no union drive.
Another barista standing nearby weighed in: “Are you like a union vigilante? Are you just going to leave and go to some other coffee shop now?”
Brisack believed that the labor movement was the only vehicle in the country for building power, outside of politics and big business. She had long ago given up on politics. Even though union membership had been in a death spiral for decades, she still believed that unions could serve as a liberating force that could address the country’s most dire problems: poverty, racism, inequality.
Her four months fighting Starbucks had given her a visceral sense of how hard the battle was going to be. “How are we ever going to overthrow capitalism when it’s this hard to unionize a single store in Buffalo?” she had said, half-jokingly, after Elmwood’s victory.
To succeed, she knew that the union couldn’t afford to negotiate a “good enough” contract with Starbucks. “It has to be a great one,” she said. And she realized that a single unionized store was never going to compel the company to negotiate in good faith.
Every day, new Starbucks stores were petitioning the NLRB for union elections. The grass-roots movement was spreading via Instagram and Twitter and had grown by mid-February to 78 stores from all over the country: Rochester, N.Y.; Kansas City, Mo.; Santa Cruz, Calif.; Eugene, Ore.; Tallahassee; Everett, Wash.
Starbucks was still fighting the unionization push, but now it was waging a much tougher and potentially more expensive multi-front war. Brisack also knew that the company, which espoused liberal values and even sold a Starbucks-themed Black Lives Matter T-shirt, was vulnerable to allegations of union busting. In February, Starbucks fired seven employees in Memphis who were seeking to unionize their store. The company said the workers violated security rules, but the union claimed the firings were retaliation for labor activity. “This might be a turning point,” Brisack said of the Memphis firings. “They can’t do this and be the company they say they are.”
The bigger the baristas’ movement, the greater the chances that Starbucks’s resistance would provoke a backlash that might damage its bottom line. Sixty stores out of 8,947 probably wasn’t enough. The union might need 600 or even 6,000. It would need help from activists, politicians and possibly celebrities.
When she thought about her own future, Brisack’s thoughts turned to her childhood hero Eugene Debs, who set her on her journey to Buffalo. Debs famously had said: “When I rise, it will be with the ranks [of the working class], and not from the ranks.”
Brisack wanted to do the same. Her plan was to stay in Buffalo in the apartment she had decorated with furniture from Goodwill, continue as a barista and build a movement that she believed could change Starbucks, and shift the balance of power in America back to people like Eisen, Fleischer and her.
Tamana Zaryabi Paryani posted a video of herself pleading for help before she was arrested. (photo: BBC)
A female activist who was arrested by armed men in Afghanistan in January was released on Saturday, the BBC has confirmed.
Her state of health remains unknown, said two sources.
On Sunday, the United Nations said a further three women had also been released.
Parwana Ibrahimkhel went missing alongside Ms Paryani, while Zahra Mohammadi and Mursal Ayar disappeared weeks later, according to the AFP news agency.
Since the Taliban took over last year, women's rights have been curtailed. In recent months women have been stopped from attending places of education and workplaces.
The women, along with dozens of others, had decided to fight back against these measures by taking part in protests.
But a few days later Ms Paryani posted a video on social media pleading for help after armed men had arrived at her house and arrested her.
After her disappearance, neighbours told BBC correspondent Quentin Sommerville that Ms Paryani had been taken away along with two of her sisters, and no-one had been to the apartment since. They said only that an "armed group" had taken them.
The Taliban have consistently denied arresting and detaining the women.
In an interview with the BBC the day after the arrests on 20 January, Suhai Shaheen, who hopes to become the Taliban's ambassador to the UN, said: "If [the Taliban] had detained them, they would say they have detained them, and if that is the allegation they will go to court and they will defend themselves... This is something legal, but if they are not detained, and they are making such fake scenes and shooting films in order to seek asylum abroad."
Women had gained many freedoms in Afghanistan prior to the Taliban's take-over.
But under their rule, Afghanistan has become the only country in the world which publicly limits education on the basis of gender.
The regular protests by women highlighting the issue are a source of embarrassment to the group.
Police from London, Ontario, block protesters from the Ambassador Bridge on Saturday. (photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)
Police in Windsor, Ontario, the Canadian municipality just across the bridge from Detroit, said early Sunday that "arrests [were] being made" and "vehicles [were] being towed." They urged the public to avoid the area of the bridge.
The bridge, which carries about a quarter of all trade between the U.S. and Canada, has been blockaded for nearly a week by protesters, some driving semi-trucks, others in private vehicles and many on foot. The protest has disrupted economic activity and closed car factories on both sides of the border.
After a court ordered protesters to end their blockade by 7 p.m. Friday, not all left. Authorities warned that remaining protesters would be subject to arrest.
On Saturday, police ticketed and towed vehicles and arrested at least one person, a 27-year-old man.
By early Sunday, the protest had shrunk to just about a dozen protesters. Television footage and video on social media appeared to show officers detaining protesters and continuing to barricade the bridge. It was not clear when the bridge would reopen.
"Enforcement will continue in the demonstration area and there will be zero tolerance for illegal activity," said the Windsor police on Twitter.
The bridge is a major gateway for trade
The Ambassador Bridge, four lanes across and more than a mile long, is a major economic route. About 8,000 trucks cross the bridge each day, collectively carrying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had warned that the blockade was adding to "significant supply chain strains."
That included the auto industry, with dozens of manufacturing plants across Michigan, Ohio and Canada that rely on car parts ferried across the bridge. Shifts at at least six factories were canceled this past week, including Ford, Toyota, General Motors and Stellantis.
Protesters have also blocked border crossings in the provinces of Manitoba and Albert, along with another bridge in Ontario about 60 miles north of the Ambassador Bridge.
Streets remain clogged in Ottawa
In Ottawa, the epicenter of the protests, thousands of truckers and drivers have clogged downtown streets in a demonstration that has now lasted weeks.
On Friday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency and threatened fines of 100,000 Canadian dollars and up to a year in jail for anyone illegally blocking roads or other critical infrastructure.
Ford said that Ottawa was "on track to remove almost all restrictions for businesses very soon," including the vaccine passport system that requires people to show proof of vaccination when entering certain businesses.
"This is great news and a sign of just how far we've come together in this fight," he said, saying that the announcement was unrelated to the trucker convoy protest.
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