Adrian Wyld/Reuters/File

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Minister of Health Patty Hajdu speak with a personal support worker who had just received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at the Civic Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Dec. 15, 2020.

As the world rolls out its largest ever vaccination campaign in a bid to control the spread of COVID-19, the fissures of global inequality that the pandemic has exposed are threatening to take on a dangerous new dimension.

In the 49 wealthiest countries, 39 million people had been vaccinated by last week, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In Africa’s poorest nations, just 25 individuals had been inoculated, all in Guinea.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned of a “catastrophic moral failure” if rich countries do not share more widely the vaccines that they have produced or bought. But governments also have a moral duty to protect their own citizens, which they must balance against any international obligations they might feel.

“It is about what is the right balance to strike,” says Maxwell Smith, a bioethicist and member of the vaccine distribution task force in the Canadian province of Ontario. “And it’s a very difficult question.”

Canada has drawn special attention because its government has negotiated deals to buy 400 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, the largest per capita stock in the world and enough to vaccinate its population five times over.

Globally, richer countries that are home to 16% of the world’s population have bought or reserved 60% of vaccine supplies, according to Duke University’s Global Health Institute in Durham, North Carolina.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose country prides itself on its generous foreign aid tradition, has said that his government will donate any surplus vaccines to COVAX, an international initiative to meet lower-income nations’ needs, and to which Ottawa has already given money. But he won’t say when.

Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone/AP/File

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), attends a press conference, at the (WHO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 25, 2020. On Jan. 8, 2021, Mr. Ghebreyesus appealed to makers of COVID-19 vaccines and the wealthy countries buying them to “stop making bilateral deals” that hurt a U.N.-backed initiative to make the vaccines more widely available.

A rising tide lifts all boats

COVAX, the largest vaccine procurement and supply operation in history, was set up by the WHO and other international organizations in a show of global solidarity to level the vaccine playing field. Its fundraising wing aims to provide vaccines to 20% of people in the world’s 92 poorest nations by the end of the year.

COVAX last week announced its first purchase agreement for up to 40 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. It is preparing to deliver its first vaccines next month, and hopes to supply two billion doses this year.

The fund received a major boost last week when President Biden announced that the U.S., which had stopped funding the WHO under Donald Trump, would become a contributing member of COVAX. But it still faces a $2.8 billion shortfall.

Dr. Kate O'Brien, WHO’s immunization director, says more than 50 COVAX members also have their own bilateral deals with vaccine manufacturers. “When countries do bilateral deals and secure their doses for early deployment, and those early doses are not distributed across all countries of the world, it inherently creates an inequity,” she says. “We do have solidarity and we do have countries with bilateral deals. There are actions that can be taken now that will continue to improve on equity.”

Failure to take such actions would be shortsighted from a practical standpoint, whatever its moral shortcomings, say many humanitarian and health experts. However many people in the richer parts of the world are vaccinated, they point out, as long as the virus is still active, and likely mutating, somewhere in the world, we are all vulnerable, and travel and trade will remain difficult.

“The government needs to explain ... that vaccinating all our citizens is not going to make the problem go away,” says Anne-Catherine Bajard, policy manager for Oxfam Canada. She believes that Canada should contribute vaccines to COVAX even before it has finished inoculating all its citizens, so as to be part of the global strategy that is needed to put an end to the pandemic.

Morry Gash/AP

Boxes containing the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine are prepared to be shipped at the Pfizer Global Supply Kalamazoo manufacturing plant in Portage, Michigan, on Dec. 13, 2020. Pfizer has committed to supply up to 40 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine this year to a World Health Organization-backed effort to get affordable vaccines to 92 poor and middle-income countries.

If the government says it will pledge supplies but gives them only when it wishes, “it’s not actually submitting itself to a global strategy managed by health experts,” Ms. Bajard argues.

And economic self-interest should also act as another spur to generosity, suggests a recent study by the Rand Corp., which found that the United States, Europe, and other high-income regions would lose $119 billion a year in gross domestic product for as long as the poorest countries are denied vaccines. That is far more than the $25 billion it would cost to supply those vaccines.

Your nurse or my teenager? 

The WHO director-general appealed rather to ethical considerations last week, as he pleaded with wealthy countries to be more forthcoming. “It is not right,” he argued, “that younger healthier adults in rich countries are vaccinated before health workers and older people in poorer countries.”

In Israel, which leads the world in inoculation rates, everyone over the age of 40 is entitled to a shot, as are teenagers facing matriculation exams.

In Canada, at any rate, where the vaccination rollout has been unexpectedly slow, donating doses to other countries would be politically untenable at the moment. But nor have larger questions surrounding a future donation been addressed.

“In terms of the ethical dilemma, whether we allocate to front-line [health] workers first, before we allocate to our population, I don’t feel like any politicians or government leaders are really grappling with that,” says Liam Swiss, an aid and development researcher at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

In Canada, says Dr. Smith, people are generally in agreement that the most vulnerable people should be vaccinated first. But they do not apply the same thinking on a global scale.

Vaccination “is something that every person on earth has an equal claim to,” he adds. “Vaccines are going to be a scarce resource and we want to make sure they are distributed fairly among all the people in the world. And clearly, that’s not happening.”

“Cry more, lib.”

The three-word tweet from a conservative politician hit social media like a poke in the chest. It was a taunt in the style of Donald Trump Jr., or perhaps former President Donald Trump himself – direct, demeaning, with a gleam of glee.

But it wasn’t from a Trump family member. It came instead from Madison Cawthorn, a college dropout and former Chick-fil-A employee, after it became clear on Nov. 3 that he had rolled over Democrats and establishment-endorsed Republicans alike to become the next congressman to represent North Carolina’s 11th district, a seat held until recently by Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. 

Is Congressman Cawthorn – only 25, with a compelling story of adversity overcome – the future of Trumpism? Born and raised in Carolina mountain country, he’s already a hit with right-leaning media figures who helped power Mr. Trump’s political rise. The day before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, he went door-to-door in the Senate, lobbying GOP senators to vote against confirming President Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. 

In some ways he’s a less abrasive figure than the former president. Asked about his touchdown-dance “cry more” tweet, he’s contrite, saying it was a heat-of-the-moment action he now regrets, the result of growing up in a competitive household. He even says he deleted the Twitter app off his phone to prevent a similar mistake.

But Mr. Cawthorn’s mix of chutzpah and ambition seems, if not Trumpian, at least Trump-adjacent. When I introduce myself at a meeting in his office he remarks on the irony that my name is Story and I write stories for a living. I tell him I’m an “aptronym,” a word that describes people whose name fits their occupation. He repeats “aptronym” enthusiastically.

“Really? Wow,” he says, and then without skipping a beat: “I’m going to rename myself ‘Speaker.’”

“Lightly threaten”

Representative Cawthorn calls Donald Trump “the best president in my lifetime” and seems tickled by the idea that some observers think he resembles the former U.S. chief executive in aspects of biography and style.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Cawthorn has a compelling personal history. He’s not a businessman/reality TV star/former commander-in-chief, but a baby-faced political newcomer paralyzed in a car accident seven years ago. In 2020 he surprised pundits by beating a jostling primary field of Republicans and then cruising to victory in a conservative-leaning district, only two months after reaching the Constitution-set minimum age of 25 for House members. (On Mr. Meadows’ advice, Mr. Trump actually backed another Republican in the primary.)

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Cawthorn evokes strong reactions from both supporters and opponents. The former see him as an appealing conservative fresh face. An older woman in a Hendersonville Walmart talks about her new “handsome, young, well-spoken” representative, despite not being able to recall his first name. The latter sometimes express visceral dislike – a Latina waitress downtown resorts to expletives when talking about the rookie congressman.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Cawthorn has quickly become a dominant presence on the conservative media circuit. Mere days after his primary win, the young North Carolinian was profiled as a “star on the rise” on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show. He’s appeared on Sean Hannity’s eponymous Fox show as well.

And like Mr. Trump, Mr. Cawthorn has been accused of helping incite the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

He was an opening speaker onstage at the Trump rally that day, supporting the false accusation that the election was stolen. Among other things, he commended the crowd for having “some fight” in it.

Two weeks prior, at a conference held by the conservative group Turning Point USA, he told attendees they could “lightly threaten” their members of Congress by telling the lawmakers that if they didn’t support “election integrity” then “everybody’s coming after you.”

On Jan. 4, he tweeted that the future of the republic now depended on “the actions of a solitary few.”

“It’s time to fight,” he wrote.

Two days later, when the mob broke into the Capitol and started pounding on doors leading to the House chamber, the congressman, who uses a wheelchair, was uniquely vulnerable. Fellow North Carolina lawmakers were instrumental in helping him around obstacles and down staircases.

When the House reconvened hours after the violence, Mr. Cawthorn voted to reject the certification of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes. In brief remarks to lawmakers, he called for “a new generation of Americans to be radicals.”

“If I had a Magic 8-Ball”

But Madison Cawthorn is not a clone of Donald Trump. Unlike the former president, he seems willing to change course in the face of opposition. That’s been the case in response to the blowback from his incendiary words prior to the attack on the Capitol.

In the aftermath of the mob attack, North Carolina Democrats called for Mr. Cawthorn’s expulsion from office for his “violent language.” A petition on Change.org calling for his resignation became the site’s fastest growing petition the weekend following the riot.

Some Republicans were upset as well. Former Henderson County Sheriff George Erwin, who was previously going to be Mr. Cawthorn’s district director in North Carolina, said he was “wrong” to support the congressman. Local conservative voters posted on Facebook about their disappointment with Mr. Cawthorn, one writing that he “deceived a lot of us.”

In response the freshman lawmaker backtracked. Pressed on CNN about why, exactly, he had objected to Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes, Mr. Cawthorn said that “the election was not fraudulent” and that President Joe Biden “is our president.” Asked in an interview about his statements before Jan. 6, he said he had meant that he would be fighting for the rally-goers in his capacity as a lawmaker.

“Obviously if I had a Magic 8-Ball and knew what was going to happen that day, I would have added some words, but I wouldn’t have changed anything that I did say,” says Mr. Cawthorn. “I was telling these people that I was going down to the Capitol to fight on their behalf, so they had a representative inside the halls of Congress.”

While he says he wants to continue former President Trump’s “America first” agenda, Mr. Cawthorn adds that he prays for President Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’ success. Hours before Mr. Biden took the oath of office last Wednesday, 17 freshman Republican members of Congress signed a letter congratulating the new president and expressing their hope that they may begin to work together for the American people.

One of the first signatures, in schoolboy cursive, was “Madison Cawthorn.”

Vision board for the future

Mr. Cawthorn was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and raised a few miles south of that city in Hendersonville. Homeschooled as a youth, his initial ambition was to attend the Naval Academy. He applied in 2014 with a nomination from his then-local congressman, Rep. Mark Meadows, but was denied.

Later that year he was returning home from a spring break trip in Florida when his friend who was driving fell asleep at the wheel and crashed the car into a concrete barrier. Mr. Cawthorn spent months in the hospital, and he says doctors gave him a 1% chance of surviving. Today, Mr. Cawthorn is partially paralyzed.

The accident was an experience, he says, which has put the rigors of politics in perspective and made him wiser than his years.

“I used to be very unempathetic to where I didn’t care about anyone else’s beliefs or what their previous life experiences were. I was just like ‘Okay, well you should get over it and let’s move on,’” says Mr. Cawthorn. “But now, going through my accident... It gives me more empathy to think about people’s past before I make conclusions about them.”

But even before the crash Mr. Cawthorn had a knack for leading other people, says Joel Benson, Mr. Cawthorn’s manager at Chick-fil-A.

He remembers one night when five buses pulled up unexpectedly, and Mr. Cawthorn, who was then a “team leader,” pumped up the rest of the employees with high-fives and cheers of “We got this!”

Mr. Benson suggested Mr. Cawthorn make a “vision board” for his future, with cut-out pictures to represent long-term goals. The final product, says Mr. Benson, included a large photograph of the U.S. Capitol building.

True to his vision board, Mr. Cawthorn launched his congressional campaign in December 2019, one day after Mr. Meadows announced his resignation. And when asked at what point in his campaign he knew he would win, he quickly responds: “The day I signed up.”

In fact, Mr. Cawthorn’s victory was far from foreordained. There was some bad press: In August a now-deleted Instagram post from 2017 of a smiling Mr. Cawthorn visiting Adolf Hitler’s vacation home “Eagle’s Nest” went viral. In the post he referred to Hitler as “the Führer” and said the visit “has been on my bucket list for awhile, it did not disappoint.”

In October, a group of former students from Patrick Henry College, which Mr. Cawthorn attended for one semester in 2016, penned a letter about why they felt Mr. Cawthorn was unqualified for office, citing sexual assault allegations, lies, and theft, from his time on campus.

During the campaign, he was criticized for making it seem as if the accident upended his plans to attend the Naval Academy, whereas he was denied before the accident. 

But in the end Mr. Cawthorn squeaked past a crowded field of Republicans in a primary run-off. Voters were skeptical of real estate agent Lynda Bennett, who Mr. Meadows endorsed as his replacement. Mr. Cawthorn was a telegenic fresh face.

Mr. Meadows and President Trump got behind Mr. Cawthorn for the general election. Donald Trump Jr. came down to campaign. Mr. Cawthorn was a good story, and got lots of free media coverage – as did candidate Trump in 2016. He beat Democrat Moe Davis, an Air Force veteran, by 13 points.

“You can’t calculate the value of the publicity he got,” says Mr. Davis.

Lunch with Pelosi?

Age is an issue that haunts both parties. Despite being the largest share of the U.S. population, millennials, people between the ages of 24 and 39 in 2020, are vastly underrepresented in politics. The top three Democratic leaders in the House are all in their early 80s, while the top three Republicans are all in their mid-50s. In the new 117th Congress, the average age for House members is 58, Senate members average 64, and last Wednesday, President Joe Biden became the oldest president in America history at 78.

In contrast, Mr. Cawthorn is the youngest current House member. Indeed, he is the youngest U.S. Representative since the mid-1960s.

“If you don’t think young people can change the world, then you just don’t know American history,” said Mr. Cawthorn during his speech at the National Republican Convention in August. “George Washington was 21 when he received his first military commission. Abe Lincoln, 22 when he first ran for office. And my personal favorite: James Madison was just 25 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence.”

(James Madison did not sign the Declaration of Independence. He signed the Constitution.)

The youngest Congressman also has one of the youngest teams. Mr. Cawthorn brought on his friend from Patrick Henry, Blake Harp, who also dropped out after his freshman year, first as his campaign manager and now his chief of staff.

Another college buddy, Micah Bock, came on board as their communications director after graduating earlier this year. Mr. Bock recalls a conversation he had the other day with another congressman’s communications director who bragged about being the youngest person in this position at the age of 26. Mr. Bock says he had to “steal his thunder” and tell the colleague that he is 23.

“There’s definitely a learning curve to how things work in Congress,” says Mr. Bock from the team’s new office in the Cannon Building, where the couch throw pillows still have their tags on them. “But so far I think we’ve been doing well. We’ve had a lot of press.... Madison is definitely someone that makes gathering media attention not too difficult.”

For all his Trumpian aspects, Mr. Cawthorn may more closely resemble another famous current politician: Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The North Carolinian hopes to become “the AOC of the right” – a young and attractive leader able to influence his party with celebrity and social media might.

With 373,000 followers on Instagram, Mr. Cawthorn has more than three top congressional Republicans – House Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Sen. Chuck Grassley – combined. (But it’s still only a fraction of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s follower count.) He posts to his Instagram story and Twitter account daily, reminding followers to catch his appearances on Fox, OANN, or Newsmax.

Unlike Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Mr. Cawthorn isn’t quite sure what legislative ends he wants to achieve with these means. At least, not in an overarching, ideological sense.

But he does have policy priorities. When asked which other member of Congress he’d like to have lunch with, Mr. Cawthorn, without hesitation, says “Nancy Pelosi.”

Mr. Cawthorn says his big to-do item is rural broadband, something that is incredibly lacking in his home district (to which this reporter can attest). He hopes that over a meal, perhaps he and the octogenarian House Speaker might be able to hash out a deal.

Two Honduran women pleaded with an immigration official last week, after walking into Guatemala with the estimated 8,000-strong migrant caravan that left Honduras earlier this month.

“I’m a single mother,” one of the young women told the Guatemalan official, her voice breaking. “You are eating well. We do not even have bananas because the river swept away all our crops, all our means to work.” She had already traveled more than 250 miles from her home in Yoro, devastated by back-to-back hurricanes last fall, and even before that suffering high unemployment and violent crime.

The official was sympathetic, but repeated Guatemala’s policy of requiring a negative COVID-19 test in order to enter. He would have to send them back across the border.

The women pushed back: Hadn’t he heard the news? The caravan was going to get help along the way. Joe Biden promised that once he was in office the caravan would be welcome in the United States and free to travel through Mexico.

The false rumors underscore common expectations for change as the Biden administration takes control, though migrants’ motivations for fleeing home had little to do with the inauguration. Over the past four years, the U.S. approach to migration has brushed over root causes to emphasize containment, effectively pressuring Mexico and Guatemala to keep migrants and asylum-seekers from continuing north.

But despite some quick actions during President Biden’s first week in office – including the suspension of new admissions to the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) policy, which forced asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico awaiting U.S. court hearings – it’s unclear how immigration enforcement might shift in the region. Historically, U.S. policy on migration has strongly informed its neighbors’. Yet containment is easier than a holistic approach that might require increased budgets and public policies, observers say.

In the past two years, Mexico’s president went from promising more humanitarian visas for migrants to deploying the national guard to keep them out, under pressure from President Donald Trump. Guatemala, one of the biggest sending countries of migrants to the U.S. in recent years, agreed to take in asylum-seekers from other countries during Mr. Trump’s administration, and met the most recent migrant caravan with force, barring the group from advancing toward the U.S. Mexico and the U.S. thanked Guatemala for its efforts.

“We know Donald Trump essentially forced this situation,” says the Rev. Mauro Verzeletti, director of the Casa del Migrante shelter in Guatemala City, speaking of Mexico and Guatemala’s increasingly militarized attempts to halt northbound migration. But he isn’t confident there will be an about-face under Mr. Biden.

“Making declarations and repressing people is easy,” says Mr. Verzeletti. Addressing the root causes that put people in such desperate conditions to begin with, he says, takes more resources, will, and work.

Oliver de Ros/AP

Bryan, a Honduran migrant, poses on Jan. 20, 2021, for a portrait in Copan, Honduras, near the border with Guatemala, after he was returned to his home country. Buses will take him and other migrants to San Pedro Sula.

Passing through

Historically, Mexico hasn’t had a true migration policy of its own, says María Dolores París Pombo, a professor at the College of the Northern Border outside Tijuana. Instead, it tends to react directly to directives and policies in the U.S.

She says Mexico has taken some of its most notable moves around migration at key moments in U.S.-Mexico relations. Mexico created its national migration institute in 1993, for example, in the lead-up to NAFTA. And it launched an initiative to cut off key flows of migration from Guatemala in 2001, before U.S. and Mexican presidents met to discuss immigration reform. Mexico militarized its southern border after President Barack Obama declared a humanitarian crisis over unaccompanied minors arriving at the U.S. border in 2014.

“Mexico isn’t a country of immigration like the U.S. It’s more a country of transit,” says Dr. París Pombo, but “the policies the U.S. adopts directly affect Mexico.”

Gretchen Kuhner, the director of the Institute for Women in Migration in Mexico City, says Mexico has national interests of its own in keeping levels of migration down. On Inauguration Day, Mr. Biden introduced the U.S. Citizenship Act, which could create a path to citizenship for some 11 million immigrants without legal status. He also issued an executive order to bolster the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, calling on Congress to enact legislation to provide permanent legal status or citizenship for so-called Dreamers, the vast majority of whom are Mexican.

“Mexico knows very well that if there’s a surge on the border, the political right in the U.S. will make a huge issue of it, and that could impact the legislative proposals for immigration,” says Ms. Kuhner. “That plays into Mexico’s approach.”

Guatemala may be thinking along similar lines: Remittances sent home to Guatemala by relatives in the U.S. reached record levels during the pandemic, surpassing $1 billion a month by the end of 2020. That’s a lifeline few Guatemalan officials want to jeopardize.

Containment is also “easy,” says Ms. Kuhner. “It’s not as messy as trying to interview people and help them get protection.”

Because of U.S. policies like MPP, Mexico has many more migrants waiting long term than before. “These are really vulnerable people and Mexico doesn’t have policies for this,” says Dr. París Pombo. “Even with MPP suspended, this isn’t going to be resolved in the short term. And I don’t think governments – neither Guatemala nor Mexico – are going to modify their current approaches. They don’t have the capacity,” she says. “They’d prefer to put the Army on their borders, detain people, and return them to their country, instead of having to take charge of them.”

Oliver de Ros/AP

Honduran migrants rest as they try to advance past checkpoints set up by the Guatemalan police in Zacapa, on Jan. 19, 2021. A once large caravan that entered Guatemala last week has dissipated in the face of Guatemalan security forces.

“Going to continue”

Guatemalan security forces blocked a road near Vado Hondo Jan. 16, holding back thousands of mostly Honduran migrants en route to the U.S., and soldiers used batons on a group that pushed through. Two days later, hundreds of police and troops in riot gear cleared the highway, effectively disbanding the caravan. Mexico deployed additional troops along its own southern border in anticipation, though the caravan wound up splintering long before.

At an immigration checkpoint in nearby Rio Hondo, it became clear the only option was to turn back. With armed forces looking on, migrants, including many young children, waited to board buses home.

Pascual Cálix was one of them. Forced to leave his home in Honduras following hurricanes Eta and Iota, he’d joined the caravan to find work in the U.S. in order to support his wife and teenage son, repair his damaged property, and replant the land on which his family depends for food.

“There has been no help from the government,” he says of Honduras’ response to the double whammy of natural disasters late last year, which impacted hundreds of thousands of people.

“The U.S. sends aid to [Honduras], but [to] the poor, nothing,” Mr. Cálix laments. He hasn’t ruled out trying to migrate again.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last week that President Biden had pledged $4 billion in a phone call for development in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, where crime, unemployment, and other hardships have generated a steady stream of migration up to the U.S. border.

Fernando Castro, former vice consul at the Guatemalan Consulate in the Mexican state of Chiapas from 2017 to 2020, applauds Mr. Biden’s plan to create an aid package for Central America. But he hopes it’s carried out differently from previous efforts, like a similar aid package deployed under Mr. Obama that Mr. Castro says “really did not work.”

Job creation should be a key focus, he says, but there need to be regular assessments to see what actually reduces migration and what does not. He also thinks regional governments need to band together to sort out their shared interests, particularly dealing with seasonal migration within the region.

“Migration is going to continue,” he says.

Some people, including human smugglers, are taking advantage of people’s hopes that the situation at the U.S. border will become more welcoming.

But, along the route north, Mr. Castro warns, “the same position that Donald Trump left [behind] is being upheld.”

Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

Ruslan, 22, a courier with Delivery Club food delivery service, wears a protective face mask and gloves as he rides an underground train amid the pandemic in Moscow on April 7, 2020.

Mikhail rides his bicycle around Moscow for up to 12 hours a day with a large insulated pack on his back, even in the dead of winter, delivering food from restaurants to hungry consumers in their homes.

This is not your old-fashioned pizza delivery service. Mikhail is a front-line worker in one of the world’s fastest-growing industries.

The company he works for, the giant digital corporation Yandex, is often referred to as “Russia’s answer to Google.” Its main competitor, Delivery Club, is jointly owned by Russia’s largest state bank, Sberbank, and one of its biggest internet companies, Mail.Ru. On any given day, each company has an estimated 10,000 food delivery couriers schlepping around the city on bicycles, public transport, and sometimes their own cars.

Since the pandemic hit, with its attendant lockdowns, business has exploded. Formerly just a convenience, delivered food became a lifeline for struggling restaurants and customers isolated in their homes. There are no reliable figures, but some estimates say food deliveries have grown at least threefold. Thousands of young people laid off from jobs like store clerks, waiters, construction workers, and such, took up delivering food to make ends meet.

It has its advantages. “Nobody cares what your political opinions are, as long as you don’t bad-mouth the company. You can pretty much choose your own working hours, day or night. There’s a certain freedom that you feel,” says Mikhail. “There’s lots of work, as much as you want.”

From the moment he accepts an order, he is paid a fixed amount by time and distance to go to the designated restaurant, pick up the food, and deliver it to the customer. But if he is delayed for any reason he will be fined. If he switches off the GPS on his phone for more than half an hour, he will be docked a day’s wages. If he refuses to accept an order, he will be fined. Mikhail figures he works an average of 240 hours per month, for which he earns about $680.

What would he change, if he could?

“What we need,” says Mikhail, “is a union.”

The couriers are completely outside Russia’s official system of labor law. No official employment contract means no security, no benefits, and no means to redress grievances. It can be dangerous too: Last April a young courier in St. Petersburg died of a heart attack, allegedly brought on by exhaustion. So ironically in a country that spent 70 years under Communist Party rule, the couriers are having to reinvent combative trade unionism culture in Russia from the ground up to better their conditions.

“There are growing numbers of people who do this courier work permanently, for a living, and there are few other prospects for them in today’s economy,” says Kirill Ukraintsev, an activist journalist turned food-delivery union builder. “Russia’s inadequate labor legislation allows them to be classified as self-employed and thus frees the company from any responsibility for them. Although they are part of the fastest-growing and most profitable business, couriers are at the bottom of the labor pyramid. They are super-exploited. We want to change that.”

“Heroes of the pandemic”

The delivery phenomenon is not unique to Russia, of course. The same sorts of couriers can been seen in cities around the globe, especially since the beginning of the pandemic.

“This is a huge and rapidly expanding business. It’s a whole new world that’s being birthed by 21st-century technologies,” says Yevgeny Gontmakher, a social economist and former government adviser. “You see the traditional bank, Sberbank, teaming up with a digital company to create a whole ecosystem of new services, and reshaping the economic landscape as they go. The people driving this are mostly young, both the couriers and management of these new businesses, and they need to develop the people skills to keep it working. It’s not just in Russia; it’s a global phenomenon.”

And just like elsewhere in the world, the couriers have little in the way of work benefits or protection. That’s why, about six months ago, Mr. Ukraintsev decided he wanted to do more than just cover social conflicts and set out to build a union for the food delivery workers.

He’s since gathered about a hundred activists, including Mikhail, into an as-yet unrecognized Union of Couriers, and claims many more supporters. They have two key demands: the abolition of fines and the right of couriers to sign proper employment contracts like other workers. Mr. Ukraintsev is quite conversant in global developments, such as the passage of Proposition 22 in California, which secured some benefits for Uber and Lyft drivers – who are in an analogous position to food couriers – but denied them others.

They’ve had a few minor successes. The group staged a one-day wildcat strike in October, and even though the numbers of participating couriers was small, the action received a lot of positive coverage from a curious Moscow media. Managers of Delivery Club agreed to meet with the activists and promised to reduce some of the fines.

Earlier, several companies had funded the erection of the world’s first monument to food couriers, the “heroes of the pandemic,” in a Moscow commercial square.

An unsigned statement from Delivery Club, in response to questions from the Monitor, said that all outstanding complaints from couriers about payment delays and similar grievances have been dealt with, and “the service is now operating normally.”

Mr. Ukraintsev says he’s under no illusions that a bit of good press and nice corporate PR is going to change anything.

“This is going to be hard,” he says. “The new digital economy destroys all contacts between people. Each one works alone, and deals with the company mostly through his telephone, without any direct human contact. The workers are a shifting labor force, many of them migrant workers who lack even the protections of citizenship and fear being deported if they make waves. Our answer is to use the companies’ own digital methods, reaching out through social media, Telegram channels, and YouTube. But we’re also doing street protests and other more classical forms of outreach.”

“These food delivery workers need to be supported”

Boris Kagarlitsky, a veteran left-wing activist and professor at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, says that despite those early successes, the couriers are going to need solid political backing to achieve their main goal of being treated like regular workers.

“It’s easier to win some results in a growing industry. If they were fighting for a few scraps in a declining industry, their early efforts might have turned out quite differently,” he says. “But it’s pretty clear that public opinion was crucial to their early gains, and is going to be indispensable in their struggle going forward. These employers, whose services work at close quarters with the public every day, need to be concerned with positioning themselves in a positive PR light, so that’s a vulnerability.

“But more than that, these food delivery workers need to be supported by political forces that will press for laws to meet their needs. If we had a labor-friendly government in Russia, which we do not, it could impose regulations on the companies to register their workers as full employees. These couriers have some support from a few Moscow City Council members, mainly Communists, but no political party has yet taken their side.”

The official 30 million member Federation of Independent Trade Unions, which is aligned with the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, does not appear interested in helping. The much smaller, more recently created Confederation of Labor has extended legal assistance to the couriers, but does not seem in a position to do much more.

“We need to counter these new employer-centered ideas about ‘labor flexibility,’ and that can only happen through concerted political action, culminating in strong laws that permanently ground workers’ rights,” says Mr. Kagarlitsky. “We are very far from that right now, but this is just the beginning.”

“Be a credit to the race.” 

“Don’t disgrace the race.”

Those were the admonitions I heard as a child in the 1950s. In essence, my elders were saying that as an African American girl, I shouldn’t contribute to the omnipresent, demeaning images of Black people in the media, a continuing legacy of the Jim Crow era. I should be well dressed and well groomed. I should “represent” my race as intelligent and diligent, accomplished and hardworking. I shouldn’t contribute to or believe what Martin Luther King Jr., in a comment honoring W.E.B. Du Bois, called a “poisonous fog of lies,” lies that depicted Black people as inferior and deficient.

Fame and fashion as protest

Glorious operatic contralto Marian Anderson died in 1993, but in connection with last week’s inauguration, the Museum of the City of New York is spotlighting her role as a groundbreaker in both Republican and Democratic inaugurations and her influence as a fashion icon. Anderson “represented” the very best of her race. She may not have seen herself as an activist, but she was a pioneer, an extraordinarily accomplished Black woman who deliberately used her fame and fashion choices to counter the prevailing stereotypes of Black women.

In 1957, Anderson broke a major color barrier when she sang the national anthem at President Dwight Eisenhower’s second inauguration. During his first term in office, racial and social unrest had accompanied the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. His first term also saw Rosa Parks’ refusal to surrender her seat on a city bus, which triggered the Montgomery bus boycott. In reaction to the turmoil, President Eisenhower issued an invitation to the Black star who, as Allen McDuffee in Timeline writes, “had somewhat reluctantly become a face of social change in America.” Four years later, Anderson again performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.

AP/File

First lady Eleanor Roosevelt presents the Spingarn Medal to opera singer Marian Anderson in Richmond, Virginia, on July 2, 1939. The medal, awarded by the NAACP, is given annually to a Black American to honor noble achievement.

Almost two decades earlier, in 1939, Anderson had been thrust into a very harsh, public glare of racism when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to perform in their Constitution Hall because of her race. That well-publicized snub led to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s withdrawal of her DAR membership and to an invitation from the federal government for Anderson to give a free concert at the Lincoln Memorial. The Easter Sunday performance drew some 75,000 people. Later that year, Roosevelt presented Anderson with the Spingarn Medal, awarded by the NAACP. Again, Anderson was elegantly dressed. 

Quiet activism

In this season of inaugurations and celebrations of the power and brilliance of women of color, as a balm to soothe the stresses of the current, violent racial reckoning, the Museum of the City of New York unveiled four treasures from its archives: a coat and three gowns that Anderson wore on stages around the world in the 1930s and ’40s.

The fashions showcase Anderson’s quiet activism. She didn’t want to be known as a “dazzler,” Callie O’Connor, collections assistant in the museum’s Costume and Textiles Collection, told me. Instead, Anderson’s brand of activism was reflected in her elegant, well-made gowns and her insistence that all of her programs be open to fully integrated audiences.

The museum’s notes about the dresses quote Anderson’s autobiography, “My Lord, What a Morning.” She wrote: “The first impression on an audience is the visual one, and one should wear what is right for one’s type. … I like simple, tasteful clothes; I do not go in for things that dazzle.” 

Since the museum is unable to welcome large numbers of visitors because of the pandemic, it is launching a digital installation for Black History Month to celebrate Marian Anderson and her legacy.

Courtesy of The Museum of the City of New York

Callie O'Connor and Julissa Nuñez, a community collecting intern for the Museum of the City of New York, dress one of Marian Anderson's concert gowns on a dress form built out to the size and dimensions of the singer's body when she wore it. The gown was custom made for Anderson by Eaves Costume Company of New York in 1938.

The fashions in the digital presentation (and pictured at the beginning of the article) include a variety of fabrics and styles:

• An emerald green silk taffeta concert gown with black silk and beaded embroidery (shown from the back), made in 1947 and worn in a series of portraits taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1947.
• A pale peach and powder blue crepe back satin gown, purchased at the Nordiska Kompaniet department store in Stockholm, Sweden, around 1934.
• A gold lamé concert gown lined in peacock blue silk, featuring an underskirt of black chiffon embroidered with iridescent sequins. The gown, which cost $310, was custom-made for Anderson by Eaves Costume Company of New York in 1938 and was purchased at the same time as the gown she wore for the Lincoln Memorial concert.
• An evening coat in navy and pink cashmere wool crepe with gilt embroidery and applied navy silk cord, purchased at the Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia where Anderson’s mother once worked for substandard wages.

Singer, songwriter, and actress Bette Midler purchased the gowns at auction after Anderson’s death and donated them to the Museum of the City of New York. 

Hearing my elders’ voices

When Whitney W. Donhauser, the museum’s Ronay Menschel director and president, asked me to participate in the digital presentation, she called Anderson “a quiet but continuous force for racial equality,” adding, “We would do well to remember Anderson’s unmistakable voice for the 2021 inauguration.”

During my career as a CBS News White House correspondent during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies, I, too, attempted to model quiet activism through my “simple, tasteful” fashion choices. Knowing that my image appeared on televisions in countless homes during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s – and hearing my elders’ voices – I did my best to “be a credit to the race.” 

The fashion choices at last week’s inauguration also carried a message, as several publications noted. Vanity Fair included Vice President Kamala Harris’ choice of a coat and dress by African American designer Christopher John Rogers in the day’s “displays of fashion diplomacy.” And The New York Times cited the vice president’s fashion as a tool “to underscore [the] message of fresh starts and racial justice, help and healing.”

Activism and “representation” were and are ever-present choices for all women, but especially for Black women in the public eye.

Jacqueline Adams is co-author of “A Blessing: Women of Color Teaming Up to Lead, Empower and Thrive.”

Reuters

Representatives of Turkey and Greece start bilateral talks on maritime disputes in Istanbul Jan. 25.

Just a few months ago, Turkey sent a research vessel into the territorial waters of Greece – accompanied by warships – to explore for undersea gas. When Greece responded with its own show of force, the two NATO allies almost came to blows. Their gunboats even collided. Since then, Turkey appears to have had a change of heart, driven in part by the European Union’s diplomacy toward its giant Middle Eastern neighbor.

On Jan. 25, Greece and Turkey held their first official talks in nearly five years. They also agreed to meet again in March to continue the “exploratory” dialogue over maritime claims in the eastern Mediterranean.

By some accounts, Turkey’s turnaround may be only temporary, compelled by a worsening economy and the election in the United States. President Joe Biden has referred to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as an “autocrat” who “must pay a price” for his actions, such as his purchase of a Russian missile defense system. Mr. Biden’s Secretary of State says Turkey is only a “so-called strategic partner.”

Another way to account for Turkey’s newfound friendliness is that the EU is relying on the diplomatic approach of German leader Angela Merkel. In dealing with troublesome neighbors such as Russia and Hungary, she often calls for “step by step” moral persuasion rather than power plays and tough sanctions. She prefers negotiations that are a meeting of equals and more contemplative than contentious. “Fear is not a good adviser in politics,” she says.

At her urging, the EU is pursuing a “positive agenda” with Turkey although one backed by talk of sanctions. One practical reason is that Turkey could again open its borders for migrants from the Mideast’s wars to enter Europe. Yet this “weaponizing” of refugees to get his way has backfired on Mr. Erdoğan, delaying yet again his Muslim country’s hopes of joining the EU.

With the EU’s firm but patient approach, the Turkish leader may indeed be in a contemplative mood. The EU is Turkey’s No. 1 export partner and source of investment. With elections in two years, Mr. Erdoğan needs the European market more than ever to reduce Turkey’s high unemployment.

At the least, he needs calm rather than confrontation with EU member Greece. As the EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell said of Turkey this month, “Like tango, you need both sides to be good neighbors.” For Ms. Merkel and the EU, that means somehow bringing out the good in Turkey. The talks with Greece show it is possible.