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Driving for Minus 20
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Indians do things to Seattle's Microsoft. They also do things to New York's taxi
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A YELLOW taxi permit in New York costs 350,000 dollars. Only a conglomerate — of garages and brokerage houses — can afford it. The driver can at best lease the taxi. That the driver can do only by placing a deposit — of around 120 dollars cash and 30 for gas. The shift, day or night, begins at -150 dollars.
There are 12 hours to make the 150 and then something more. "There are very few professions in which you find not only no guarantee on the lease amount, you actually lose some. The driver may have made 130 dollars. But getting stuck in business hour traffic might hit and after 12 hours the driver may have - 20 dollars to show," Biju Mathew, who, with 12 others, works for the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, says of the New York taxi driver.
Computers man
Biju Mathew was here to make a presentation last week as part of Ethnography Lecture Series of the National Institute of Advanced Studies. Biju is a computers man. He has a doctorate in Information Sciences from Pittsburgh University and is now Professor at a "not so known college" close to New York City that allows him to pack a week's work in two days. In the five days left, he looks into the life and livelihood of taxi drivers.
People here may remember him as the man chased by an Indian right-wing organisation for being part of campaigns in the U.S. to stop funds to such organisations.
Biju is a graduate from Nizam's, Hyderabad, and has seen intellectuals like Kodandarama Reddy, Geeta Ramaswamy, "Kanna" (Kannabiran), and Balagopal who have shaped the rights and literary movement in Andhra Pradesh. This may account for his "political sensibility" and work among immigrant communities in New York.
The New York taxi: A story of Immigrants
The particular experience, however, of being stuck in a traffic jam at a "reinvented" Times Square one night seems to be the immediate trigger. The taxi-driver, Rizwan, not surprisingly, was "abusing" people. "I was looking around and I suddenly realised Times Square was not what it was four years back. I saw a whole lot of sex shops around me, the kind that allowed a peep show for the intrepid New Yorker. And I saw Walt Disney too. I realised the space had been completely reinvented." Reinvented, he says, for the entry of big firms under the Times Square Re-development Plan that came with a subsidy of 2.2 billion dollars.
Biju joined the New York Taxi Workers Alliance in 1996, around the time a young, South Asian woman, Bhairavi did. If Biju's work seems surprising, Bhairavi's is blasphemy — what, for heaven's sake, is a woman, a South Asian at that, doing organising taxi drivers in New York?
Rockefeller plans
It happens that New York City has 97 per cent of its taxi drivers among third world immigrants, half of them from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and the rest, West and East Africans, Caribbean Blacks, and Arabs. They have replaced the Whites of the 70s and early 80s. Biju attributes the change to the "Rockefeller Plans" of the 60s and 70s that "de-industrialised" New York City in the late eighties and nineties. "It may not be a conspiracy, but industry was pushed out of downtown Manhattan systematically. The zoning laws showed that. A whole White file moved out and there was a dramatic change in demography. The inside of the city was the shell and de-industrialisation did nothing to replace the African-American community there. The traffic and taxi industry too changed dramatically." Walt Disney, to him, was "a metaphor for that reinvention" that would impact the taxi industry first, and Rizwan's abuse for "a Square that seemed rearranged for people who loved safe, suburban pleasures".
F.I.RE city
New York turned into "the F.I.RE City" — as Biju would like to call it - Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. A range of service sectors opened up. While the young generation White-collar class from the suburbs went into banking, finance, real estate, and insurance, the new working class coming in from the third world into New York and Chicago, and the African-Americans left behind by the Whites, took to taxis, restaurants, and parking lots. (The middle-class Indian immigrant of the early 90s took up University education and moved into a whole range of techno-services).
This re-organisation after, the taxi industry changed dramatically. The 80s and 90s, Biju says, saw "leasing and contractual infrastructure". The taxi industry took the first hit - permit costs spiralled. And improvements in taxis were geared to manage relationships that collapsed first in the taxi industry. The meter, for instance, came in. It would, Biju says, go off the moment a passenger sat on the back seat and the driver would negotiate to get the passenger to sit on the handle! The meter told the employer how much the driver really made in a day. In the 70s, there was no such control and the employer-employee equation actually worked well. They split earnings — almost equal — at 51 per cent and 49 per cent. "No taxi driver ever went home without a pay packet then. They would share the risks of earning."
But two important events in the taxi industry in the last six years changed things a bit, says Biju. The strike the Alliance called two months back (May-June 2004) "was the biggest victory since 1967 on any issue of importance". When the meters first came in, owners grabbed 70 per cent earnings, but recent strike reversed that. The take-off point, however, was the May 13, 1998 strike against mayor Juliani's 17-rule package for taxi drivers, intended, the Alliance argued, to control drivers. The rumour then, says Biju, was the package meant to de-stabilise the taxi-industry by having Walt Disney buy a stake. But after the strike call, the mayor backed off. "It was easy to dismiss it as a rumour. But the presence of Walt Disney means just that - buy into the pleasures of the suburban class," Biju observes.
Danny Glover's call
The Alliance, which, at one time had less than 600 workers supporting it, now has at least 5,000 workers "agreeing to get taxis off the roads". And this best works, says Biju, at airports that at any time have 300 to 500 taxis lined up. An airport strike in the U.S. really hurts — they are way out of the city.
The Alliance looks into itself closely. Biju recalls Danny Glover calling a press conference on taxis that refused his call, three of them. "We used that incident in a campaign against racism among taxi workers. We persuaded them to talk about their own nationalisms too... And the drivers voted to go public on opposing the war in Iraq when we said they would be the first to get hit on the street... "
In a country that is good at cover-ups, the work of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance is good unmasking.
PRASHANTH G.N.
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