NY Cabbies, Modern-Day Sharecroppers, Bid for Health Care

The New York Taxi Workers Alliance released a groundbreaking plan yesterday to win health care for drivers. Classified as independent contractors, the city’s 50,000 licensed cabbies are uninsured at twice the rate of other New Yorkers—52 percent lack coverage, according to a city councilman’s 2009 survey.

The health care fund (and a modest raise) would be financed by a fraction of a 15 percent fair increase proposed by the NYTWA , a group of 15,000 dues-paying drivers which has no bargaining rights under labor law but acts like a union nonetheless. The rest of the fare increase would add to the ample income of garage owners and leasing agents.

“We’re the tax collectors for the state,” said Mohammad Tipu Sultan, referring to a 50-cent surcharge taxi drivers gather to help pay for the city’s transit system. “But they don’t recognize us as workers.”

The fare proposal must win approval from the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, which last approved an increase seven years ago. NYTWA’s proposal would add about $2 to the fare for the average three-mile cab ride (currently about $11).

“The price of everything keeps getting jacked up, but we’re in the same place we were seven years ago,” said cabbie Jarenton Muñoz at the rally drivers held in front of the Commission’s offices. He noted that gas cost $1.80 a gallon in 2004.

The Alliance says winning a health care fund—technically a Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association the Alliance would run—is particularly important because taxi workers suffer extraordinary rates of occupational injuries and violence on the job.

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Muñoz walks with a limp after 12 years behind the wheel, and said he recently lost several days’ wages paying out of pocket to get a tooth pulled.

NYTWA hopes its health care fund could be a model for other groups of independent contractors who have long fought for basic benefits and rights on the job, like the thousands of mostly immigrant truckers who haul goods away from the nation’s ports.

RISKY BUSINESS

Taxi driving used to be a stable job until 1980, when the city shifted to a precarious contracting system and told drivers—unionized at the time—to start leasing or starve. Conditions in the industry declined, incumbent drivers drifted away, and the union disintegrated.

As a result, drivers today enjoy no benefits. In fact, they’ve been called modern-day sharecroppers, because they start each day $113 in the hole to pay their lease to the garage owner or agent.

“In today’s taxi world, the driver bears all of the risks,” argues the Taxi Worker Alliance report, pointing to rising gas prices, fees for credit-card readers and cab TVs that are passed along to drivers, and the ever-present danger of injury and unpaid disability.

Sorting through the Byzantine levels of fees and add-ons charged to drivers, the Alliance estimates they take home only a third of each dollar they earn. Pay averages $96 a shift for 12 hours on the streets—a rate that puts drivers 5 percent below the state minimum wage.