Longshot Queens council candidate’s campaign ends in chaos

Fatima Baryab, who ran for City Council, and her campaign took hours to pay canvassers, many of whom were homeless. Eagle photo by Amir Khafagy

By Amir Khafagy

As City Councilmember-elect Shekar Krishnan celebrated his victory with family, friends and supporters at Friend’s Tavern in Jackson Heights on Election Day, a few blocks away, Krishnan’s opponent, independent City Council Candidate Fatima Baryab’s campaign descended into chaos.

Around 9 p.m., just as the polls closed, Baryab’s campaign headquarters at Jackson Heights’ Diversity Plaza saw Baryab’s father, Agha M. Saleh and a campaign worker engage in a physical altercation on the staircase leading into their basement offices. The shouting between the two reverberated across the sparse plaza.

As the two berated each other, pulling at each other shirts, several other campaign workers, crowding the staircase, attempted to desperately pull them apart. When the workers were finally able to separate the two, Saleh immediately called the police and accused the worker of assault. Before the police arrived the worker along with two others had fled.

The fight began because the workers, all of whom were Black and many of whom were unhoused, accused Saleh of refusing to pay them for their work on the campaign. Though all of the canvassers who stuck around for what would turn into a three-hour ordeal, ended up with a check after the argument, the delay caused some to miss shelter curfews.

All 17 workers alleged that after working a 12 to 8 p.m. canvassing shift on Election Day – for which they were promised $120 at the end of the night – the Baryab campaign was attempting to cheat them out of their day's wage.

For three hours the canvassers were kept waiting in a cramped basement office for their payments. All of them were told that they would be paid promptly after working the 8-hour canvassing shift only to be given the runaround when they returned to the office, they alleged.

Many of the workers claimed to be living in homeless shelters and said they had to return to the shelter before their curfew, which they’d miss if they didn’t get paid promptly.

Others said they had long commutes home and had to pay babysitters extra for the delay.

Fantasia Nelson, from Woodhaven, said she would have to pay her babysitter extra money for watching her two kids because she didn’t expect to be waiting long to be paid.

“I’m waiting for my money. I got people babysitting my kids right now,” Nelson told the Eagle. “I thought I was going to get $20 an hour but I’m only getting $15. Even so, we worked 8 hours but have been here over 10 hours but only getting paid for 8 hours.”

Mora Giwa, a 28-year-old from Canarsie, Brooklyn, said she didn't understand what was taking so long.

“All I know is that I’m supposed to be paid tonight,'' she said. “I’m being patient about it for now but I don’t know for how much longer.”

Outside Baryab’s campaign headquarters, Russell Cheek, a self-proclaimed seasoned political operative, claimed he was tasked by the campaign to recruit canvassers for a last-minute Election Day get out the vote blitz. He explained that it’s typical for a campaign to pay canvassers immediately after the work shift. In his experience, it was the first time he had ever seen a campaign fail to pay its canvassers in a timely manner.

“I've been working with every elected official in the city and state for the last 17 years and I never, never, never in my long wicked life have I ever had a situation like this,” he said.

“There are people working here with me throughout the years and we have never had this kind of discoordination.”

Trip Yang, a political consultant whose firm, Trip Yang Strategies, represented Krishnan during the campaign cycle, said it is uncommon for campaigns or political firms to hire unhoused individuals to work canvassing shifts.

“I've never heard of it from a professional campaign,” Yang said.

Yang said that typically consulting firms will hire from a pool of seasonal workers. In some cases, campaigns will hire canvassers individually, particularly in situations where a large group of potential voters may speak a language other than English.

In cases where a campaign hires a large consulting firm, it’s typical that canvassers – who will be paid by the firm – don’t get a check for a couple weeks, Yang said. But nonetheless, canvassers are often working class people in need of the money as soon as possible.

“Everyone should be paid if they did the work – sometimes you pay folks at the end of the day, at the end of their shift, and sometimes you pay folks at the end of the week,” Yang said. “If a campaign pays a consulting firm, the consulting firm handles that...but day canvassers are often working class people, so they're almost always going to want to get paid at the latest one or two weeks after they do the work.”

Two hours into the standoff, Fatima Baryab arrived. When asked by the Eagle about the delay, she said she wasn’t aware of the issue.

“Let me figure out what's going on,” she said. “I just got here. I literally don’t know what's going on and I have no communication from anyone.”

When pushed, she claimed that the workers were misinformed about their payments.

“I don’t think they were supposed to get paid tonight,” Baryab said. “I think they were supposed to come in another night.”

She later said that the workers were not told in advance of their shifts that they were going to be paid another day.

“No, not by my campaign, there was some miscommunication,” she said. “However, this is a campaign and sometimes miscommunication happens.”

When Baryab’s mother, Shazia Kausar, arrived she began to berate the workers for the poor performance and said that many of the workers were supposed to be fired for tardiness as well as a host of other alleged infractions.

“They were supposed to come at 11 a.m., but nobody showed up until 1:30 p.m.,” Kausar said.

Frustrated with the canvasser’s work ethic, Saleh partly blamed the canvasser’s unprofessionalism for his daughter's loss. Baryab finished third in the race, with a little over 16 percent of the vote.

“I never knew that they would bring untrained people from the street,” Saleh said. “Whole bunch of crooks.”

Baryab agreed with her parents and claimed that some of the workers were poorly disciplined.

“They were fired because they were not doing their job. Not all of them but a handful,” she said. “They were supposed to give out literature at the poll sites and some of them weren’t. Some were on the phone. Some were sitting down and some were helping another candidate record a video.”

However, the workers hadn’t been told that they had been fired until after completing their shifts. Baryab blamed the miscommunication on her campaign manager.

“I told my campaign manager that they were fired but he didn't communicate to the other people and now I’m in the s–t,” she said.

Stanly Wright, a 31-year old from Harlem, said he needed the job to help support his two kids but if he had known that getting paid would take a battle, he would have stayed away.

“They said they want us to do the work. We do the work on time but we don’t get paid on time,” Wright said.

Wright described an atmosphere of hostility and distrust when he arrived at the campaign headquarters. He said Kausar would take pictures of the canvassers she suspected were not performing their duties and would arbitrarily scold them on the street.

“The work standards were horrible,” he said. “I had to ask them for a break. They didn’t offer us one. No job in the world makes you work straight without a break.”

During the interview with Wright, Baryab’s father interjected by claiming to not know who Wright was and accused Wright of attacking him even though Wright was not involved in the altercation on the stairs.

Nelson agreed with Wright’s account of their treatment and accused the campaign of discriminating against them because they are all Black.

“When I first got there I felt the racism but he had to keep going because you need the money,” she said. “And I guess they know that so they get to treat you how they treat you.”

Baryab denied the accusations of racism and instead claimed that at least one of the canvassers was racist against her and called her a white cracker.

Baryab’s campaign was not short on cash. It was able to raise $431,194, with $61,863 in private donations, $40,000 in loans and $329,331 in public matching funds, according to the Campaign Finance Board.

Baryab ran in a crowded race for the seat as a Democrat during this summer’s primary election. She finished in fifth place and soon after registered to run in the general election on the independent Diversity Party line.

Her campaign centered around law and order policies.

After three hours of arguing, the Baryab campaign began to hand out checks to the canvassers one-by-one. The checks did not cover the hours spent waiting for the money.

Nelson said she worried about her children and was afraid that her husband would think she was out having an affair. She left feeling traumatized by the experience, she said.

“This was hard money for me today but I got through it,” she said. “But for them to play with me like that was hurting. They hurt my dignity a lot emotionally, mentally, and physically. I'm exhausted.”