How the Taxi Workers Won

[BeckyDem]

The 45 days of fierce protest, shrewd organizing, and ferocious solidarity that ended the debt nightmare that had engulfed the taxi industry.


By Molly Crabapple


December 13, 2021


On September 19, a group of cab drivers organized by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance rolled up to the corner of Broadway and Murray Street in downtown Manhattan, parked next to City Hall, and declared they would not leave until the city fixed the crushing debt that had driven many of their fellow drivers to suicide. They held a press conference, hung an SOS banner from the nearby Beaux-Arts subway entrance, set up some folding chairs, and sat down to wait.

I stopped by the encampment at midnight to find eight drivers trading jokes on the lonely concrete of the Financial District. Augustine Tang invited me to join them. Thirty-seven years old, with the characteristic swagger of a native New Yorker, Tang had inherited his father’s taxi medallion—the badge that gives cabbies the right to operate—along with $530,000 of debt. He was one of the group’s most eloquent spokespeople and also one of the youngest. His companions were all older, men who had spent decades behind the wheel—like Mohammed Islam, from Bangladesh, who owed $536,000, and “Big John” Asmah, from Ghana, who owed $700,000. At an age when many people are contemplating retirement, these drivers instead faced a future of 14-hour workdays that would bring them no closer to freedom as well as harrowing financial burdens they would pass on to their kids.

But these drivers also knew a way out, which is why they had decided to camp outside the gates of City Hall.

In late September of 2020, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance had drawn up a plan to cap drivers’ loans and limit their monthly payments. The city ignored it, just as, for years, it had brushed off NYTWA’s protests against medallion debt. This sit-in was an escalation—an attempt to force New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s hand.


https://www.thenation.com/article/society/taxi-driver-strike/



Amazing resilence!

[brush]

1. With the competition of uber and lyft, are the NYC taxi medallions...

worth much anymore? At one time didn't medallion owners count on them to fund their retirement?

[BeckyDem]

2. It is a little complicated:

How NYC Inflated Prices and Manufactured the Taxi Medallion Crisis

Since 2011, yellow taxi revenues have dropped by more than 30%. At their height in 2014, yellow cab medallions were selling for $1 million. The value of medallions soared due to the City’s artificial inflation of medallion values to drive up revenue. But since the proliferation of Uber, Lyft, and other rideshare apps beginning in 2011, the medallion value has plummeted. As of September, taxi medallions are a meager $80,000. Highly regulated, as of 2014, the City had limited the number of yellow cabs available to about 13,500.

But rideshare vehicles had no such limits; the amount of them on the streets tripled between 2010 and 2019, from 40,000 vehicles to over 120,000. With Uber and Lyft flooding the market and the City’s failing to quickly regulate ride-share apps, yellow cabs couldn’t compete.

https://documentedny.com/2021/11/23/taxi-cab-medallion-explained/