Biju Mathew, a business professor at Rider University is one of the central
organizers of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. Photograph by Erin Frederichs.
15 December 2005
Of Cabs and Capitalism
Adam Dunn interviews
Biju Mathew, whose book Taxi: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City is
just out. This is the fourth column in a Cobrapost series on taxi drivers
in New York, and the South Asians amongst them.
Biju Mathew, a business professor at Rider
University is one of
the central
organizers of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. Photograph by Erin Frederichs.
With the exception of an obscure title from the 1970s now long out of print, there really isn’t a book about the history of the New York City yellow cab industry. The ubiquitous yellow machines draw the attention of photographers, tourists, and children’s book publishers who churn out cute-and-cuddly animated taxi tales every Christmas.
Dr. Biju Mathew’s Taxi is not a history of the yellow cab industry per se, although it does offer an abbreviated chronicle of the industry’s trajectory from its Depression-era beginnings of "horse-hiring" up through the drivers’ strike of 2004, when fares went up while lease caps did not (thus putting more money in drivers’ pockets than those of the fleet owners — "the merchants of despair". Mathew (a business professor at Rider University) is one of the central organizers of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a de facto union for yellow cab drivers (who, as independent contractors, are not officially eligible for a union of their own). The book might alternatively have been titled "A Tale of Two Strikes", as it focuses on the span between the 2004 strike and its less successful predecessor of 1998.
There is plenty of material here for students of labor relations, the ethnic makeup of the taxi fleet, and those who just want to know how drivers make money (or don’t). But what the book really offers is a sociological view of the transformation of a 21st-century global metropolis from a post-industrial office park to global control center through the prism of one particular industry. Mathew views modern-day NYC as a FIRE (financial, real estate and insurance industries) city, taking his cue from CUNY sociologist Robert Fitch’s 1993 book The Assassination of New York, with its population and supporting service economy arranged around it. Mathew refers to this process as the "suburbanization" of New York, and credits former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani with much of its craftsmanship. "It is the specific part of the middle class for whom NYC is being re-crafted - the largely white service industry professional, whose very corporate cultural basis is a specific kind of sophistication," he says. "I code this figure as the new yuppie who enters NYC in many ways on a daily basis - as a commuter from the suburbs, as young tourist, as traveling executive and also as the new resident of the Upper West Side, Chelsea, the new downtown apartment complexes of the 1990s, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. In other words, this specific kind of middle class is not necessarily a ‘resident’ of NYC but is also those who come into the city on a daily and regular basis, and in whose image I argue Giuliani was rebuilding the city."
How cab drivers fit into Mathew’s vision of the city (which at times is presented such a densely theoretical framework that it seems he’s hailed a cab and is driving off into the empyrean) is not always easy to see, but it’s well worth the effort, as the facts and delicious anecdotes about the industry just aren’t available in book form anywhere else. For instance, not many know of the block on FEMA aid to cab drivers (another possible legacy of the bad blood between Giuliani and the industry going back to the ’98 strike). "When you were a yellow cab driver and you approached one of the FEMA relief centers on the piers, you were blocked at the entrance and told you were not eligible because your site of business was not in the affected area," Mathew explains. "If you drove for so-and-so’s garage which was registered in Long Island City instead of 3 Worth Street, you’re not eligible." An even darker disclosure appears when Mathew explores the backlash against Muslims by local and Federal authorities. "The community of Midwood in Brooklyn, one of the hubs of the Pakistani community, got really attacked by the authorities," he says. "All these raids, nobody felt safe. At 3 in the morning, there’d be a knock on the door. Some FBI agents, INS agents, along with NYPD, showing up at the door, chasing some random, fleeting piece of information. The moment that knock comes on the door, it automatically puts those on the other side of that door on a list. The authorities ask for a particular person and if that person’s not there, they automatically check everybody else." Mathew delves deeply into the problems faced by immigrant drivers, from family separation to the INS—and he pulls no punches.
Cab drivers, Mathew seems to think, were (and still are) on the front lines of this struggle between those who dictate the rules of the city and those who work within them. From the post-9/11 period (when drivers saw their business dry up) to the present (when hybrid vehicles are being introduced into the fleet at an accelerated pace in the face of soaring fuel costs), drivers are increasingly relied upon as part of the matrix that makes the city run. "The important thing about that is that yellow cabs are part of the medium that connects all these people and businesses," Mathew says. "Any one aspect shutting down immediately has an impact, and when several aspects shut down the impact is multiplied." Such was the case after 9/11, and without further driver organization and constructive dialogue with city officials, he warns, such may be the case again.
(Cobrapost News Features)
Previous columns in this series
by Adam Dunn
Come One, Come All
All Together, For Now
Bad News from Home