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Thinking Globally, Working Locally:
N.Y. Taxi Activist and Author Visits S.F.
By Ruach Graffis

Several months ago, UTW got a call from a group of drivers in New York who are trying to get a health care plan. They heard we were well on our way to that goal, and wanted to know how we had done it. That started a wonderful and profitable dialogue. On April 5, we met one of their organizers, Biju Mathew, in person.
Biju teaches computer science at Rider College in New Jersey, but his heart, and most of his energies, are devoted to the New York taxi industry, through the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. He has written a book about the NYTWA that finally focuses attention on the drivers, the people who do the work. Up until 2005, the book most often referenced about the taxi industry was written as a historical document about cab companies, by a former member of the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC). Drivers were little noted, and not well regarded. With the arrival of TAXI! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, our day has come. Part social critique, part history, part memoir, and an unabashedly political analysis, he reveals us to ourselves.
Although the book is nominally about New York cab drivers, any San Francisco driver will be familiar with the same issues. The harassment by TLC officers and cops on the street; the long hours for low pay; the high medallion lease fees; the current and historical difficulties drivers have faced confronting entrenched political interests. Faced with the ineffectiveness of solitary struggle, the New York drivers gave birth to New York Taxi Workers Alliance. Bhairavi Desai is their main organizer.
When the TLC created pages of new and repressive regulations in 1998, the Alliance organized a 24-hour taxi strike. Most of the 12,000 New York taxis participated. After Sept. 11, the Alliance organized a town hall meeting of cab drivers, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) representatives and city officials that resulted in payouts to drivers for economic losses owing to the attacks.
Biju’s book documents how globalization in India, Pakistan, Palestine, Mexico, China and elsewhere has produced an endless supply of immigrants who leave their families for years at a time to work at a dangerous, low paying job driving a taxi. Living three, four and five to a room, or sometimes in their cabs, they send money back home to their families. Biju calls it “the Disneyfication of the family.” Drivers go home from time to time and “consume family life, the way you consume a movie, or dinner, but they are no longer involved in the day-to-day decisions of their families.”
During his visit, Biju spoke at U.C. Berkeley and Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco. At Modern Times, he opened with a description of how the gate system is the industry version of a global phenomenon: forcing the person with the least resources to shoulder most of the risks. He contends that many of the worst horrors of outsourcing and sub-contracting were first experimented with in the taxi industry in the 1970’s. It is called “leasing” but it is really just a way to make the company nearly immune to the vagaries of business.
After hearing Biju talk, one UTW member asked what he thought would be the most important reform that could be instituted in the cab industry. “Get rid of the medallion,” Biju said. What a thought: if A-cards equaled medallions, drivers could work when they wanted to. They could still rent cabs from companies if they wished, but without the added cost of the medallion holder’s fee. Gates could be lowered $30-$40 per shift, instantly! Renting a cab would be like renting a car. (You can get a Crown Vic from Hertz for $69.99 a day.) That difference alone would pay for health care, disability, retirement and more.
Who could argue with that?