I spent my spring break last week interviewing taxi drivers about their working conditions, at taxi stands all across Los Angeles. It was my first week of conducting this research and we found handfuls of South Asian taxi drivers, far fewer in proportion to the taxi drivers in other metropolitan cities. I did get the chance to talk to a royal looking Sikh man with expansive white beard, who answered our questions predominantly in proverbs. Mostly though from what I saw, L.A. taxi drivers are immigrants from all over the world all working together in a not so forgiving career.
 |
|
Taxi-Wallah |
Luckily, the research we are doing here in L.A. is based on the success of the taxi worker alliances in New York City and the San Fransisco Bay. If you are in the Berkeley area this week, I highly suggest attending this talk (via The Seemamachine).
On April 5th at 7p, join Biju Mathew, an Associate Professor in the College of Business Administration at Rider University in New Jersey. Biju worked as a lead organizer for one of my all-time favorite organizations, New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance. NYTWA… is headed up by the wondrous Bhairavi Desai, whose leadership and commitment have resulted in health and legal services for NY’s taxi drivers, relief from burdensome and inefficient TLC practices, and a true spirit of organized power for the people that make the Big Apple move. Mathew’s book–Taxi! Cabs & Capitalism in New York City–canvasses the struggles drivers have faced within the taxi cab industry. His lecture will address same.
The lecture will be following the photography exhibit opening of “Taxi-Wallahs of Berkeley: Photographs and Narratives by Aditya Dhawan” hosted by the Center for South Asia Studies. You can see his taxi worker photos online and his exhibit will be running through June. Both events will be on the UC Berkeley campus. In the meantime down here in Los Angeles, I will continue to talk to as many taxi drivers as possible.
awwweeesssommmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee………
and i hope it gets the ball rolling for the better of the taxi drivers. makes me think of everytime i’m in a taxi in NY, the drivers are always sooo kind to me. they can never do enough.
Hey Taz, did you ask them why they never pick up any of my black friends?
i love the taxi that says khalsa on it!
i’m enjoying all the pics in thee series. i like the coit tower one also.
Wow … those are some crazy pictures.
What, you mean the individual drivers Taz spoke to didnt pick up your black friends? Man, you must have telepathic cross-national psychic powers to know that those dudes specifically picked on your black friends. Amazing.
PearlJamFan
We are always looking for volunteers, how about you come down to LA and ask them yourself? Seriously we are looking for volunteers.
Side note: In Los Angeles, a big chunk of the taxi drivers are black- largely Ethiopian. If they didn’t pick up your friends, it was likely because they were acting beligerant and drunk- the taxi drivers told me they are more scared to pick those people up than they are to racially profile. At least, here in L.A.
acck…if there was a way for me to get to LA, I’D volunteer!
In NYC, brown taxi drivers are gradually being edged out by Caribbean and Africans, but that hasn’t led to an improvement in taxi service for the average African-American male. It’s more complex than Pearl Jam Fan (or Razib most likely) want to make the situation seem.
Taz, That’s awesome that you are doing this. Please keep up posted on the research unfolds.
Taz, what is your interest in researching Taxicab drivers in LA? I ask this because outside of NYC and rest of the world specially South Asian countries it is such a marginal profession in the US. It seems LA has just 2300 cabs. As a South Asian I can understand the certain romance in riding a taxi-cab, spend a few minutes with a complete stranger in a cab that can form a certain empathy – but that part simply does not exist in the US. I attended a lecture on Taxi-cab driver by Biju one time. Most of us came out wondering the the whole point because we were not going to meet one in our lives! I have myself taken three taxi rides in the last 15 years.
We interact more with delivery drivers – Pizza, UPS, Mailmen – but hardly ever with taxi-cabs.
did u say large ethopians..
heh heh, sorry, couldnt resist. being a avid photographer, ok, more so maniachal, i am HUGEly greatful for the link.. cheers
PS: ur first official post was great!
Those were some cool pics. I’ve always been treated nicely by taxi drivers, and it’s always fun to get the “vaat pind are you from?” question from the uncle behind the wheel. For the few minutes of sitting in their cabs, you get a sense of how difficult their lives are, but for the most part they’re still pretty friendly.
As an aside, I saw pictures of Naan ‘n Curry in the SF album. That place always brings back memories of nausea.
PearlJamFan and others who are interested: Biju’s book, Taxi!, includes a discussion of alleged racial profiling among taxi drivers in New York City and the Giuliani administration’s response and NYTWA’s response to the controversy. Actually, the whole book makes for a quick interesting read. The economics of the industry are fascinating if, thanks to a lot of legal maneuvering on the part of the garage owners and medallion owners, highly stacked against the drivers.
yeah, and you know i think….the more understanding and forgiving your of them, the better they are. alot of people are to quick to jump and say ‘that’s cuz they want your money’. that’s not true. especially when i was just a young bud roving in NY with a friend….she always let me talk to the taxi driver, as she was shy towards them…so she’d pay them, and i’d be the one to ist there and carry on a discusion, or smile with them, or something. and later on, when they came across me getting into the can in a pair of churidars and kurta, or salwar kameez, it drew curious questions, and some fun discussions. i love the taxi drivers in Ny, most of them. havn’t been to LA yet…but i have a lot of respect for those who drive taxi…it’s not easy. i’ll have to check out biju’s book.
Robin:
Urban America interacts with cab drivers a lot more than rural/suburban America. The DC Metro area has something like 20,000 cabs (here’s an old report with cab total in DC proper listed at 6,000… in 2003. But that doesn’t include the huge companies in VA and MD, or even private operators in DC).
LA is just a weird place. Everyone seems to either:
1) have a car 2) not have the money for one
But 2,300 sounds like a very small number.
It’s more complex than Pearl Jam Fan (or Razib most likely) want to make the situation seem.
have manish trace the IP. i don’t operate under psuedo-pseudos 🙂
it’s not him. i back him on this one.
I expressed myself poorly. I meant that I believed that it was likely that both PearlJamFan and Razib would see the issue differently than I do.
lol…you’re forgiven ennis!
Technically, I’m doing this as a graduate researcher here at UCLA (in addition to getting the MPP). I hope that in researching I will gain the methods skills needed to make myself a better organizer to support our community. From the student side of me, there are few opportunities to work on desi angled research projects that have an organizing perspective and previous success, in an academia setting. If I learn how the academics do this, then hopefully I can transfer the skills to my SAAVY interests.
But I hardly think that romantic ideals are any reason why people organize. Your argument implies that because there are not a lot of them, there is no reason to organize them. 2600 is not a great enough number (I heard it was 3600- we aim to sample 400). Well there are 70 million Americans that carry guns, and only 2 million South Asian Americans- Relatively speaking, if playing numbers, there is no point to organizing desis because we just don’t have enough. Of course we know how silly that is.
Secondly- (I just read Helen Zia’s Asian American Dream that has a wonderful chapter on SAA organizing and the history of NY taxi worker organizing), “cabbies and limo drivers are more than twice as likely to be KILLED on the job as the next group-sheriff employees and baliffs.” In October 1993, three Pakistani-Americans were killed in 24 hour time span and it was the organized efforts that brought this to light.
Finally, why should it matter that I’ve never taken an LA cab before? It doesn’t make their job any less relevant. I am a daughter of hard working immigrant blue collared workers, and every day that I talk to these men I see the same struggle that I see in my parents eyes. No healthcare, twelve hour days, sometimes 20 hours, racially harrassed by your customers, no time for family, some are even college educated. Isn’t the injustice of one person (or 3600) worth fighting for?
Just out of interesting, by ‘organizing’ do you mean like forming a union? i.e. a worker’s union?
Sounds like you’ve got something to prove, Taz.
That would be ‘just out of interest’ of course.
BTW, enjoying your blogs!
Taz, sometime back there was an excellent article in the NYTimes about what happens to NYC cabs when they retire(It’s currently behind the PITA Times$elect firewall, BugMeNot won’t get you through). IIRC, it also covered some economics of the industry, license plates, behind-the-scenes of how some of these NYC cabs get repaired/repainted and moved to Chicago(Philly too?). If you’ve not already read it, you might want to. I vividly remember the step-by-step slidshow accompanying the article was v.good. (Infact, if you get hold of the article do send me a pyraytid copy of it :p Though I am not into any cab-research, but such topics are always interesting, and it seemed like one of those good off-beat articles to have).
Heh! guess what? 15 secs could save you 15% or more! Some URL tweaking did it.
Try this link(it shd somehow get you through the backdoor) and here’s the slideshow. Let me know if you still can’t get past.
Nah, just learning to rant like an academic.
Not really- though it is one form of organizing. I see it more as getting a group of people together to push for any type of a cause. i.e. to me, almost everyone is an organizer, even SM.
Thanks for the link Suhail.
Yes. For an injustice committed on 1, 10, 100 or 1 million–it is worth fighting, Taz. Thank you for underscoring the importance of organizing within any community–large or small–with a sharp eye towards those enclaves of people, those industries of workers, those smaller fiefdoms of workingclass women & men, whose voices otherwise would go unheard.
To highlight a very recent example which hardly directly relates to labor, unions, or other traditional paradigms within which organizing occurs: if you’ve followed the Padilla case, you’ll know that a U.S. citizen (no different than you or I or the next non-U.S. citizen, for that matter) was detained by the U.S. government in 2004. No reason was given, no bail offered, no access to a lawyer. Just detained. Now. The 5th amendment to the U.S. Constitution states in plain writing that “no person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Its not legalese. Its not complicated. And yet, somewhere in its covert administrative annals, the Administration blatantly violated one of the very esteemed constitutional rights about which it otherwise so gallantly beams. Justice Stevens himself conceded that, “at stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society.”
And yet, 24 hours ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Padilla’s appeal was worthless. That this so-called “enemy combatant,” later moved to Miami where he [finally] faced criminal charges, posited an appeal that had since become “pointless.” Pointless? Since when did it become pointless to grant an American citizen, or any “person” for that matter, due process? If today you stab me, tomorrow I charge you, and by Thursday the wound has stopped bleeding, has it become pointless for justice to be served? In good judicial form & political measure, Breyer, Souter & Ginsburg argued that the case ought be heard anyway. Instead, at the mercy of the war-mongering and cowardly administration, the Court rejected Padilla’s appeal.
Back to bengali’s query:
Yes. Taz is referring to that type of organizing. And the Padilla example is another example of why its important to organize. The power (and necessity) of bringing issues like this to light, of mobilizing people & organizations around those issues, of filing amicus briefs with the Supreme Court–whatever the task may be. Organizing isn’t just important; its critical. Movements happen because people organize–in communities, on schoolgrounds, in countries. Organizing is important because, detaining a U.S. citizen for three years without filing charges against him–a blatantly illegal act–not only makes a fool of our democratic & legal systems, it shames humankind. To the extent we hope to combat that, we organize.
So we organize. Because the voices of dissent, of justice, of freedom and of true democracy, otherwise go unheard. Because underdogs aren’t always given the front page, the ear of the White House Press Secretary, the mic. We organize because we find strength in numbers, because collective bargaining (under the traditional model of labor law) has long been one of civil rights’ strongest weapons against an otherwise hegemonic, politically imbalanced society. Because there ain’t no power like the power of the people (and the power of the people don’t stop).
Longest comment ever posted (sorry; got carried away)?
Is it just me or has the SA cabbie population in NYC experienced a significant drop over the past couple of years? It used be heavily SA but now I see all sorts – hispanics, african americans, fob africans, whites…
In NYC, brown taxi drivers are gradually being edged out by Caribbean and Africans,…
sorry, just saw this.
Metrocabs, Metro Cabs, Metro Radio Cabs