Public Employee Press

Book Review
Sweatshops on wheels: NYC taxi drivers fight back

"Taxi: Cabs and Capitalism in NYC," by management professor and taxi activist Biju Mathew is a fascinating history of the Taxi Workers Alliance, a union which burst onto the scene in 1998 with strikes against repressive New York City government fines and fees against taxi drivers.

Mathew supported the organizing early on and describes the alliance's growth from the inside with interviews of activists in their cabs, on their breaks and at marathon meetings with the members of this mostly immigrant workforce from a multitude of countries, who worked together to organize what they call "sweatshops on wheels".

In passages that read like a novel interspersed with lucid analysis, Mathew describes the history and development of a system of exploitation based on the inflated price of the cab medallion issued by the city to gain the right to pick up passengers. The workers have no labor law protections; they are forced to take all the economic risks by paying for gas and a fee (over $100 per day) to take out their vehicles that must be recouped before they make a penny.

To survive they work 12 hours a day, six days a week and are cheated by garage owners and medallion brokers at every turn. But while taxi drivers were redefined since 1979 as self-employed, excluding them from labor law protection, they knew they were workers and formed the Taxi Workers Alliance to fight collectively for their rights.

In 2007, cab drivers struck again to stop the imposition of GPS tracking devices that monitor their workday and the 5 percent credit card fee that they alone must pay.

While they have not received a rate increase since 2006, Alliance Executive Director Bhairavi Desai is hopeful that in July they will win the rate hike proposed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission that would go mostly to drivers and the first-ever Healthcare and Disability Fund for Drivers.

The Taxi Workers Alliance received national recognition by the AFL-CIO and is organizing taxi workers around the country. They are part of a new wave of organizing by workers from domestics to many Teamsters and farm workers who are defined as self-employed or otherwise excluded from the labor laws.

—Ken Nash
DC 37 Education Fund Library
Room 211