Book review: Biju Mathew, Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City (New York: The New Press, 2005)

 

--Chi-ming Yang

 

 

Every once in awhile, a book comes along that makes the abstract concrete and gets you to take notice of the world around you in a different light.  In the compressed world of New York City, for all the unexpected moments of intimacy between strangers, heightened visibility of social relations does not necessarily equal their transparency.  One may on a daily basis rub up against race, nation, gender, and class in trying to get from ‘point a’ to ‘point b,’ but ultimately it is the abstraction and alienation of human labor that makes possible the more or less smooth functioning of everyday life in a capitalist system.  Yellow cabs are as indispensable to the intense pace of the city and its service-based consumerism as they are iconic fixtures of the urban landscape.  Biju Mathew’s new book, Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, tells the largely neglected story of the new immigrant work force driving the city, the institutionalization of the taxi industry and its history of exploitation, and the making of an unusual labor movement.  A long-time activist and organizer of the grassroots New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), Mathew documents the organization’s struggles for drivers’ rights over the past ten years.  Told in part through the experiences of drivers themselves, the book situates the grueling lives of these working class immigrants in a system of local as well as global controls.

 

What comes across most forcefully in Mathew’s book is the formidable complex of risks and disadvantages, physical, psychological, and material, faced by taxi drivers as they attempt to make a living.  The first myth that Mathew sets out to dispel is the common perception that drivers, as “independent contractors,” earn good money.  In fact, such a job classification is illusory, he argues, given the extreme dependence of drivers on a leasing system designed to benefit the owners and impoverish the workers.  Drivers work twelve hour shifts, seven days a week, under duress, what NYTWA founder Bhairavi Desai has elsewhere called a “sweatshop on wheels.” [i]    But because they lease their taxis for a daily or weekly rate from powerful fleet garages and brokerage houses, they must in each shift first earn enough in fares to cover the rent and gas before any money goes into their own pockets.  If you add in the many obstacles of the road—faulty equipment, bad weather, police or passenger harassment, out-of-borough trips—it is possible that, at the end of a long shift, the driver will have actually lost money. 

 

Unlike under an older commission-based system where employer and employee split the profits of the meter, the current structure creates an enormous disparity of income and power.  As Mathew writes:

 

In 1998, for example, the average driver working overtime made an annual salary of $19,000, while the owners made on average $1000 per cab per week.  At that time, the cost of a medallion, the city-issued permit required for each cab on the street, was $250,000. [ii]   A medallion currently sells for $300,000, making it prohibitive for drivers to buy, and relegating them to a cycle of lease payments and debt as they absorb the risks and costs of a business that affords few benefits or protections against the widespread corruption of fleet owners and the city officials often in collusion with them.

 

In what is perhaps the most illuminating section of the book, Mathew draws on the knowledge and experiences of older cab drivers to lay out in detail the history of how the particular, labyrinthine system of New York City taxi leasing emerged over the past several decades in concert with neoliberal economic policies and a changing immigrant work force.  The creation of the leasing system dates back to an earlier moment of unregulated leasing, or “horse-hiring,” by mobsters and car manufacturers of the Depression era.  City reforms of the 1930’s resulted in the creation of a medallion or license system that, while it sought to regulate employers, effectively put drivers under the control of the corporations or individuals that could afford to buy the permits.  In the words of one driver, ‘The lease sits around my neck like a hangman’s noose’ (48). 

 

Capped by the city at a certain number, these medallions became highly lucrative private property on the market.  As ownership within the industry became more fragmented, with smaller and private owner-driver medallions weakening, a new and powerful managerial class of brokers began to consolidate ownerships and profit off of every transaction from insurance sales to credit union agreements, controlling as much as 50 percent of the market.  Brokers, for example, lease out cars on a weekly basis so that drivers can ostensibly make payments toward ownership of the vehicle and thus afterward limit their costs to the actual permit or medallion charge.  However, in this process, drivers have to absorb the cost of repairs to the vehicle, and risk the potential loss of thousands of dollars of investment if brokers renege on agreements, as is wont to happen in any number of ways.  It doesn’t help that the organization established to oversee the industry, the notorious Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) has historically been embroiled with corruption and racism, and tends to side with the profit-making interests of the city government, brokers, and owners at the expense of drivers.

 

The vulnerabilities of the drivers are given further historical and demographic specificity in the current post 9-11 climate of racism, when the Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian men who today make up the majority of the taxi driver workforce are routinely targeted as the enemy of the state and subjected to racial profiling, arrest, mass deportation, and even torture under the jurisdiction of the INS and the FBI.  In addition to their routine harassment by police, who, in collusion with the TLC, often flout due process and unduly issue tickets for speeding or other violations to make revenue for the city, drivers after September 11 were subjected to what Mathew calls a “psychological sense of terror.”  In some instances, they were insulted by passengers and accused of conspiring with Osama bin Laden, and in other instances were brutally attacked and hospitalized.  Even before 2001, under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s tough-on-crime administration, drivers were vilified as rapists and “taxi terrorists.”  The frustration of one Haitian driver is palpable:

 

‘I mean, how do they want me to behave?  Docile, polite, meek, quiet…Should I bow, should I say yes sir, thank you sir, all right sir, each time I speak?  I don’t understand this, man.  How do they want me to be?’ (84).

 

The degree of control passengers assert over drivers can also often be a subtle, neo-colonial back-seat, front-seat dynamic that strips the driver of even basic dignity: for example, the passengers’ sense of entitlement in asking the name or birthplace of the driver while themselves remaining completely anonymous.  Following this idea, in another section of the book, “Nice Racism,” Mathew offers a class critique of the white and immigrant bourgeoisie that, in multiculturalist fashion, dotes on the latest trend in ethnic food on the one hand, and utterly demeans or disregards the actual communities fetishized by this food, on the other.

 

These stories are told to help us understand both the victimization of these minorities, but also the systemic and human reasons for their journeys to this country.  In a chapter entitled “The Prehistory of a New York Taxi Driver,” Mathew connects the personal stories of Pakistani, Sikh, and Haitian men who left their families and home countries in the 1970’s, to macro-level shifts in the global, agrarian economy.  Such attention to local-global interaction helps to explain the influx of workers from the third world into a business previously dominated by Italian and Irish immigrants. 

 

Drawing on the work of urban studies scholars like Saskia Sassen and David Harvey, Mathew makes an interesting although cursory case for the transformation of New York in the 1980’s into a “global city,” or a capital of finance under neoliberalism.  The organization of the taxi industry thus mirrors any number of corporate operations in a post-Fordist era of labor monitoring and exploitation:

 

The governing logic of the neoliberal economy is that of farming out risk, something most easily done when you work only on margins offered by trade…. Top management companies like Enron and Worldcom worked a range of financial scams in which, like the taxi brokers, they spiked their earnings well beyond the rates available in the game of margins by leveraging information that they had and that the ordinary employees, like taxi drivers, lacked. (105)

 

Re-organization of the city center and its transportation network in the Giuliani years entailed “cleaning up” the streets and creating a “visual order”—otherwise known as penalizing the poor—to service the new “suburban/neo-urban white middle class” commuter.  It is in this context of disciplinarity that Mathew argues for a parallel criminalization of new immigrants and African Americans, two groups that are usually not associated.

 

Dialogue across race, nation, and ethnicity is, after all, the challenge as well as the reality of a workforce as diverse as the taxi industry.  Above all, this book documents the feat of putting together a labor movement among a constituency representing over 80 ethnicities and languages, whether Bangladeshi, West African, Haitian, Pakistani, or Egyptian, not to mention numerous cab societies and associations, some with their own unions.  These are workers who, unlike in other sectors, don’t share an office or factory space, don’t necessarily come into contact at all with each other, and in fact directly compete with one another for fares, their livelihood.  But through massive outreach efforts—campaigns of flyer distribution, street canvassing, protests, and press conferences—the NYTWA has successfully organized a number of unprecedented strikes and, most recently, an historic wage increase.  The chronicle of these mobilizing efforts is inspiring.  On May 13, 1998, over 24,000 drivers, or 98 percent of industry’s the active workforce, withheld their labor for a 24 hour period to strike against abominable work conditions.  Again, after September 11, 2001, the Alliance mobilized against the government’s refusal to grant federal emergency disaster assistance to drivers, despite huge losses in profits, estimated at 60 to 80 percent of their daily income.  And, on March 30, 2004 the NYTWA won a historic victory when the TLC agreed not only to increase metered fares by 26 percent, but to limit to 8 percent the raise on the leases the companies charge the drivers.  This was the first time in roughly 30 years that the bulk of the revenue would actually go toward driver incomes.

           

The dedication of the Alliance organizers, the majority of whom are themselves drivers, and the sense of community that has been created between drivers and organizers, was readily apparent at Biju’s book launch, held at the new Brecht Forum space on May 13, 2005 to mark the anniversary of the 1998 strike.  Many drivers could not afford to leave their shifts to be there, especially on a Friday night; those who were there, were sacrificing precious income to participate and celebrate.  One veteran of the taxi business, an older white man, shared his reflections on the history of the leasing structure with the audience; another driver, Ethiopian, unabashedly read from the book a passage in Urdu; and the female founder of the NYTWA, Bhairavi Desai, spoke of how the organization had made a conscious decision to expand beyond the original mandate, which addressed the rights of South Asian cab drivers exclusively.  In response to one audience question, Biju reiterated the vision of coalitional politics and the importance of organizing along the more inclusive lines of class ideology rather than merely racial or ethnic identity. 

 

In the book, as well, he highlights the ongoing process of consciousness raising and working toward inter-racial solidarity.  The primary example he recounts is the case of the Hollywood actor and activist Danny Glover who, in November 1999, received national media attention when he was refused taxi service on the streets of New York, a kind of racial discrimination commonly cited by African Americans.  The city’s ineffectual response was to punish the immigrant drivers by installing undercover inspectors on street corners and booking drivers who did not stop for certain types of people, thereby simply re-directing the discrimination and exacerbating racial tensions.  Mathew discusses how the NYTWA’s self-critique and dialogue with Glover was much more productive, however, by bringing out the complexities of racial coding amongst the working class; in order not to lose profits by picking up passengers who might be going to outer boroughs, for example, drivers often discriminate out of material necessity.  Only through continued dialogue can an understanding of the problem and ways of addressing not only the differences, but the similarities, of the African American experience and the new immigrant experience be realized and dealt with meaningfully.  It is the shared condition of the working class that similarly allows new alliances to be forged between, for example, Indians and Pakistanis interacting in the United States as partners of diaspora.

 

Because Biju Mathew speaks not from the position of the ethnographer, anthropologist, or investigative journalist undercover, but as an organizer invested in building a left movement of driver power “brick by brick,” his book takes on many agendas at once.  It is as much the tale of a post 9-11 global city as it is a behind-the-scenes account of the culture of taxi drivers and the implications of race and class in labor organizing.  It is part labor history, immigrant story, and manifesto on the politics of social justice work.  His broad critiques of globalization, theories of globalization, and multiculturalism are accompanied by a critique of the pitfalls of community-based organizing and activism for activists’ sake.  At the same time, the deference paid toward the drivers’ and organizers’ voices counterbalances his own scholarly and personalized account.  The result is a book that is at once humble, and hugely ambitious.  It is, like the now thousands-member strong organization it chronicles, a space for the airing of grievances, sharing of stories, and fighting for better conditions.  And, like the movement, it is necessarily multi-directional, and thus perhaps best characterized as an impressive piece of work, as well as a work in progress.