NYC taxi workers

[Doug Henwood]

This afternoon I went to a press conference, held at the Brecht Forum by
the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. Their second taxi strike in a week is
slated to begain at 5 AM Thursday. The scene has gotten confusing over the
last several days as a group of owner-drivers first proposed to shut the
city down with a blockade, which prompted our fascist mayor, Rudy Giuliani,
to go mad, threatening to seize licenses and medallions of anyone who
participated. There's little doubt he would, though it'd be litigated to
death. The right-wing Democratic chair of the City Council transportation
committee, Noach Dear, told the owner-drivers (disruptive petit bourgeois
elements, eh?) that if they droped the blockade plans Giuliani would talk
with them. They did, and a Giuliani deputy said that Dear wasn't speaking
for the mayor and he wouldn't meet with them. The NYTWA never supported the
blockade, but they've been tarred a bit by the association. The
non-medallion livery drivers, who Rudy hopes will break the strike by
picking up Manhattanites hailing them from the street (which they're not
allowed now), seem to be backing up the strike right now, though who knows.
Rudy says he won't talk with the NYTWA, since they misbehaved by running a
successful strike.

The NYTWA folks were very impressive, sharp talkers and politically
sophisticated. Their chief spokesperson is Bhairavi Desai, though the
organization seems very nonhierchical; she was joined by Biju Methew, whose
day job is as a professor of MIS at a business school, but who comes out of
a serious left tradition in India. a couple of unidentified drivers, Lloyd
Taylor of a livery drivers association, and their laywer, Arthur Schwartz.
The mainstream reporters (not the guys from Taxi Talk magazine & cable TV)
were their usual selves, asking idiotic horserace kinds of questions -
who's getting political points, mainly. Desai emphasized that this is a
labor struggle by some of the most marginalized people in NYC - cab drivers
are 90% immigrant, mostly from South Asia, Latin America and the
Carribbean, and Africa. Yuppies love to whine about them; NY Press's Mugger
columnist (owner Russ Smith) goes on about how smelly, inarticulate, and
lost they are in this week's product. Methew emphasized that the only
players in this struggle with common interests are the riders and the
drivers, since both care about safety. The city wants to milk cabbies for
revenue (the city does next to nothing to regulate cabs, but they pull in
$2 million a month in fines and fees), and the owners want to milk cabbies
for profits.

Giuliani is making a big deal about how dangerous cabs are, but it's cars
that are the problem in NYC, not cabs; cars run over hundreds of people a
year.

I taped an interview with Methew, which will run on my radio show tomorrow
night (WBAI, NYC, 99.5 FM, 5-6 PM Thursday). He talks about the two-year
effort in organizing this strike among such an apparently disparate group
of workers; what the cabbie's workday is like; alternatives to the
medallion system; etc. I'll write up a bit about that after the show
tomorrow.

Doug