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Voice of cabbies

Bhairavi Desai

New York: She is an unlikely leader of taxi drivers — a college graduate, a woman, soft-spoken. But as New York City’s two-day taxi job action headed toward its finish, India-born Bhairavi Desai reaffirmed her prominent role in the city’s labour movement and her willingness to make bold moves on behalf of her membership in the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.

“She doesn’t rattle easy,” said Ed Ott, head of the New York City Central Labour Council. “That’s the thing that’s very interesting to me. Under extraordinary pressure, she keeps an even keel.”

He added: “She never raises her voice. She never swears. She’s steady as a rock.”

Ms. Desai, 34, is a slight woman, 5-feet-1, 50 kg, who co-founded the alliance in 1998, the same year the city’s taxi-drivers refused to drive in a historic one-day walkout over working conditions. This time around, she organised a 48-hour work stoppage over the city’s insistence that all taxis be fitted with new technology, including global positioning system equipment and video screens that will allow customers to pay by credit card.

The cabbies are complaining that the GPS technology will allow Big Brother into their taxis, and that the credit card option will cut into profits as there will be a 5 per cent fee on every transaction. The technology must be in place as the taxis come up for inspection starting October 1.

The city has 13,000 yellow “cabs” and 44,000 licensed drivers. The alliance — an advocacy group, not a union — claims to represent about one-fifth of them.

Ms. Desai was born in India, where her grandmother, as related in stories to her grandchildren, was arrested in the fight for India’s Independence. Her father was an attorney who “fought for the rights of the underprivileged,” she once said. — AP

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