Doesn’t Drive--but Champions Harried Cabbies

NEW YORK —  The line follows a trail of discarded coffee cups down the block and around the corner. There are easily 500 cabbies outside the Taxi and Limousine Commission, waiting to renew their licenses.

It’s a sight that fills Bhairavi Desai with rage, and rage explains why this fervent Indian-born woman who has never driven a taxi, or a car for that matter, is here handing out fliers and pleading with drivers to unite.

Desai, 26, is the face behind the Taxi Workers Alliance, the most successful effort in years to organize New York’s yellow cab drivers, most of whom are South Asian immigrants like herself.

Just a year old, the alliance is still a fledgling group with 1,500 members in a work force of 41,000. But it has already pulled off the biggest taxi strike in city history.

“She’s a tremendous asset to the drivers,” said Michael Wishnie, a law professor at New York University who has worked with the drivers group on immigrant rights. “She’s very intelligent, very charismatic.

“She has rightfully perceived that there are tremendous injustices because of the way the city has chosen to construct this industry,” he added.

As in most major U.S. cities, New York cabbies are largely lease drivers, paying $80 to $115 a day to use a licensed cab. If they can’t work--say, because of long lines at the taxi commission--they still pay.

Lease drivers typically work 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, averaging $70 a day after their lease fee. Most never succeed in buying a cab license, or medallion, currently selling for about $230,000.

Few people except immigrants will endure such brutal hours and poor pay. The drivers come from 90 or so countries, some 70% from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Many of the others are Haitians, Latinos and Africans.

“We call this a sweatshop on wheels,” Desai said in an interview. “We would like to have an investigation of the industry . . . and the only way to do this is to organize the voices of the working industry.”

“Taxi drivers are a very visible work force, yet politically they’ve been invisible for many years,” she said.

Long considered exploitative, lease driving was banned in New York in the 1930s. The city reintroduced it about 20 years ago, and it has almost completely replaced commission driving, in which a driver pays a percentage of the day’s take to the taxi’s owner rather than a set fee.

In the 1960s, cabbies formed a union affiliated with the AFL-CIO. It so alienated drivers over the years, in part because of its failure to prevent the return of lease driving, that it essentially collapsed three years ago. Since then, except for the Taxi Workers Alliance, drivers have organized only as ethnic-specific groups.

In her silwar kameez, a kind of pantsuit, Desai hardly looks the hard-bitten labor leader. Small, mild-mannered, she admits to being shy. Working the line at the taxi commission, she does more listening than talking as the drivers vent their frustration.

But she’s not afraid to speak her mind.

“You have to be very aggressive when you do social change work,” Desai says. “There’s love for the people you’re working for but an equal amount of rage for the conditions they are living in.”

Born in Bhadheli in India’s state of Gujarat, Desai came to the United States with her parents when she was 6. She grew up in predominantly white Harrison, N.J., where her mother works in a plastics factory and her father ran a grocery store until his retirement.

She earned a reputation as a rabble-rouser while still in high school, leading protests of South African apartheid. In college, her causes were closer to home: the poor immigrant women in her area.

Politics is a family tradition. Desai’s grandparents were active in the Indian independence movement and her father is “very political and progressive.”

“I never had to grow up with parents saying, ‘You have to become a doctor, lawyer, engineer,’ ” she said. “I’ve never had that drilled into me.”

After graduating from Rutgers University with a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies, she linked up with the Lease Drivers Coalition, a project of the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, a New York advocacy group.

“I wanted to concentrate on building a mass organization with poor people. Taxi drivers were the ideal constituency,” she said.

Over the next year, she spent 50 to 60 hours a week talking to drivers at garages, airports and gas stations, plowing through obstacles of language, culture and gender.

Desai, as fierce a feminist as she is labor leader, says she has experienced fewer come-ons and lewd remarks than she expected from an overwhelmingly male work force. When it happens, she doesn’t hesitate to take the offender to task.

“When you dismiss someone for their behavior, you also dismiss their potential to improve,” she said.

Outside the taxi commission, Desai is popular even with drivers who don’t belong to the Taxi Workers Alliance. None seem to mind that she doesn’t even drive. (Like many New Yorkers, she relies on mass transit.)

“I respect her because she works for humanity,” said Shemsher Malik, 50, from Pakistan.

Steve Seltzer, 68, a retired cabbie who for years was active in efforts to organize drivers, said Desai once asked if she could accompany him to a garage.

“The first thing you know, she’s in the parking lot and she’s got 15 to 20 drivers gathered around her and she’s talking to drivers about the need to act, to get together,” he said.

“The thing that awed me was there was no disrespect shown. They were listening. They were attentive.”

Early last year, Desai and a handful of supporters broke with the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence to form the Taxi Workers Alliance as a labor organization.

The alliance got its first test a few months later when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani introduced $150 fines for discourtesy, instituted drug tests for drivers and dramatically raised penalties for driving violations.

The group called a strike and Desai campaigned tirelessly to make it happen. When dawn broke on the strike day last May, New York’s streets were strangely quiet. Even the alliance was surprised by the turnout, estimated at all but a few hundred of the city’s 12,000 licensed yellow cabs.

It was the largest show of unity ever among cabdrivers in New York, a phenomenal achievement, even if it didn’t stop the rules.

The Taxi Workers Alliance is not a bona fide union. For that it would have to hold federally supervised elections. Still, it is trying to function like one, providing legal services and talking of setting up a health plan. Members pay dues, enabling Desai to finally collect a paycheck after months of relying on the generosity of friends.

Desai refuses to call herself the group’s leader, though she is the only paid person on the 16-member organizing committee.

“People are so used to seeing these individual stars. I don’t see myself that way at all,” she said.

“I’m an organizer. I’m not interested in running for office. I’m obviously not making a lot of money. My vested interest is seeing a lot of other poor people gain a sense of respect and justice.”