Labor and Workplace Studies Field Internship May ChenFall 2012Stephen Cheng

Final Paper

Introduction: Some background

This semester with the Joseph S. Murphy Institute of the City University of New

York, I took on a field internship at the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA).

After speaking with Ryan Richardson, a former Union Semester student and a current

NYTWA staffer who is the organization’s benefits coordinator, in August about the

project I would be responsible for as a CUNY field intern, I began working from the

NYTWA’s office on 28th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The main tasks for my

project were to interview by telephone taxi drivers who were attacked on the job and then

use the information gathered from the interviews to write a policy paper. The purpose of

this policy paper, which is essentially an edited collection of drivers’ stories about on-the-

job violence, is to convince the general public and lawmakers to support the Taxi Driver

Protection Act (TDPA).

The passage and enforcement of the TDPA would raise the penalties for attacking

taxi drivers and compel the government of New York State to treat such attacks as the

legal equivalents of attacks on public transit employees. Two years ago, back in mid-

2010, the NYTWA and its members drivers successfully lobbied the New York State

Assembly to vote in favor of the TDPA, the then-Governor David Paterson vetoed the

bill on a technicality. Paterson vetoed the TDPA bill even though one of the most brutal

attacks on a New York City taxi driver occurred that year at 4:30 AM, March 28, when

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Mohammed Chowdhury became a victim of a knife attack at the hands of two women.1

The current project: Context, premises, data, interpretations

In the next year, 2013, the NYTWA will try to promote the TDPA again.

Although Ryan and Bhairavi Desai did not tell me the details about this second attempt

such as finding a legislator to sponsor the bill (the previous sponsor was Rory I.

Lancman), I know through discussions over the autumn that they want the policy paper to

capture the points of view of the drivers. In doing so, the NYTWA hopes to use the

policy paper to win support for the TDPA and, this time, also see through the successful

passage of the TDPA. Taking into account the NYTWA’s motive behind this project, I

began doing some basic research on taxi driving in New York City and I tried to develop

a survey.

Since in the past NYTWA-affiliated researchers, some of them field interns, as

was the case with a 2010 research project by the Occupational Health Internship Project

(OHIP) which covered the same topic, gathered information and developed reports which

were saved on the NYTWA office computer network, I was able to take questions

directly from various surveys and base original questions on pre-existing research. All in

all, the survey was mostly based on previous work. However, where this survey (and its

associated project) differed from previous research projects such as the one by OHIP is

the focus. The OHIP project was mainly based on quantitative data whereas the current

project is qualitatively focused.

More over, although the OHIP research resulted in the writing and development

of a scientific paper, straightforwardly titled “Workplace Violence Against Taxi Drivers,”

1 See this news article for more information: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/united-states/drivers-officials-rally-for-taxi-driver-protection-act-33183.html

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the current research has, for the most part, “practical” applications in the form of the

aforementioned policy paper. Analytical and theoretical implications of my project may

be of relevant to future NYTWA research and public relations efforts, since Bhairavi and

Ryan have expressed interest in a study (presumably quantitative, too) on the history of

the taxi driving industry in New York City and its working conditions, possibly dating

back to the 1970s. The policy paper, along with the previous research, may serve as a

source, possibly a foundation, for future research work such as a historical study. Of

course, that possibility depends on the data that other researchers and I have already

collected.

So in terms of the data that my work on this project over the semester has

garnered, out of forty-eight selected NYTWA member drivers who were attacked on the

job (their information and case summary notes are stored in a Microsoft Excel file that I

regularly referred to), I was able to interview at least, if not exactly, twenty-one drivers.

All twenty-one drivers are immigrants, mostly from countries in South Asia such as

Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, some from countries in Africa such as Ivory

Coast, Morocco, and Senegal, and one from Turkey, an Eurasian country.2 Save for one

driver, who was only a victim of fare evasion and a witness to an attack on a fellow taxi

driver on the same day (indeed, within the same hour), every other driver was a victim of

on-the-job violence.3

2 There is one driver listed on the Excel spreadsheet who is a white US-American. Although he visited the NYTWA office and gave me documentation on his case and we maintained sporadic e-mail communication, I was not able to interview him. He said that he could complete the interview on the computer and then return the completed interview form to me, but that did not happen. 3 The experience of that driver was the most unusual case that I encountered during my time with the NYTWA. The driver told me that his passenger left his taxi without paying the fare, walked across the street, bought food from a vendor, walked back across the street, and began kicking another taxi driver. In the meantime, the driver I was interviewing had already called the police. By the police arrived at the scene, the passenger was still kicking that other driver. The police subsequently arrested that passenger.

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Although all the drivers told me different stories, a few common threads arose.

While some drivers told me that they had no idea as to why a bystander or a passenger, or

multiple bystanders or multiple passengers, for that matter, would attack them, others

noted that the attacks were motivated by chauvinism (i.e. racism, xenophobia) and

disdain (possibly along socioeconomic lines). Also, multiple, various drivers mentioned

that indifference from the police was, more often than not, a concurrent factor.4

Drivers cited indifference from the general public as a relevant matter as well – one

driver told me that he and his fellow drivers are more or less “punching bags.” Such an

observation, in and of itself, speaks volumes.

The same driver who used the term “punching bags” also said that taxi drivers

discuss among themselves the issues of assault, prejudice, indifference, fare evasion, et

cetera. That is certainly not a surprising trend among drivers, anything but surprising, and

the drivers’ collective awareness of the taxi driving industry’s conditions points to a

possible “hidden transcript.”5 In this context, the drivers’ “hidden transcript” is indicative

of discontent with the working conditions, although the possibility of public resistance is

an open question.

However, the NYTWA is taking into account drivers’ discontent by seeking a

legislative solution in the form of the TDPA. Most of the drivers I interviewed stated

their support for the TDPA – only a few said that they do not know enough about the

TDPA or that they do not support the proposed legislation. The TDPA and the support it

has (and likewise, the support that the NYTWA has, along with the growing prominence

4 One driver told me that a police officer merely asked one question, “How do you keep your hair spiked like that?” 5 The term “hidden transcript” is the core concept of the book Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press, 1990), by James C. Scott, a professor of political science and anthropology at Yale University who specializes in agrarian issues. Generally, a “hidden transcript” refers to secret communication and knowledge among those subject to hegemonic repression.

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of the organization, as exemplified by its induction into the American Federation of

Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations on August 3, 2011) are indicative of a

promising result as drivers express their grievances on this issue and as the NYTWA

seeks to represent drivers’ views. Granted, the TDPA, being a legislative approach, is a

“mainstream” tactic. Nonetheless, it is something to work with. Should TDPA become

a law and enforced as such, then there is certainly a sign of progress -- the New York

City taxi driving industry may become somewhat more tolerable for its own workers.

General observations and implications – Theoretical connections

I continue this discussion by posing a question on research methods that has

haunted sociologists and other social scientists (i.e. anthropologists, political scientists,

historians, etc.) since the end of time (or at least since the development of modern science

in general and modern social sciences in particular): Are plausible generalized

conclusions based on small qualitative research samples possible? This is not at all an

unfair question in light of my research for the NYTWA -- the work is completely

qualitative. However, and as Ryan discussed with me, I also have access to quantitative

research by the OHIP field interns. The OHIP researchers quantified and therefore

provided a general statistical framework on violence and other attacks against taxi drivers

on the job. My interviews provide some very concrete, “on the ground,” and individual

perspectives. So far, then, the NYTWA has a data set (or perhaps, rather, multiple data

sets) that balances the quantitative and the qualitative, the abstract and the concrete. In

this case, NYTWA and I have the privilege of working not just with a small qualitative

sample but also a relatively larger quantitative sample. So again, the question I posed.

How can I answer it?

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I already made some observations from the data in the previous section. There is

no question that the observations are based on information from the taxi drivers I spoke

with. There is no question, either, that more than one driver told me about prejudice from

attackers (to say nothing of the physical attacks) and indifference from the police and the

public. The important sign to note is that multiple drivers informed me about the above

trends. Although I am stating the obvious since quantitative research by OHIP and new

stories have already exposed violence against taxi drivers as a social issue rather than an

individual one, so does the fact that not just one driver reported prejudice and

indifference. The latter provides a close look. That close perspective is of substantial

significance.

Given that significance, and given that the social phenomenon that is on-the-job

violence against taxi drivers has been established as a fact in multiple ways, what other

generalizations can be made? More over, can those generalizations lead to connections to

other social phenomena and, for that matter, social, political, and economic theories? I

think there are plausible connections to be made between the data and some of the work

that sociologists such as Richard Lloyd and Miriam Greenberg have done on the

contemporary neo-liberal capitalist city.6 In short, there are credible relationships to be

drawn between the data from previous NYTWA research and my own research for the

NYTWA and specific topics that fall under the purview of urban studies, not to mention

labor studies, political economy, etc. I can also add more traditionally designated social

science fields such as history, sociology, and anthropology.

6 Richard Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), and Miriam Greenberg, Branding New York: How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World (New York and London: Routledge, 2008).

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Lloyd and Greenberg authored studies on neo-liberal capitalist development in

Chicago and New York City, respectively. Both of their studies provide fascinating (in a

sense) portraits of urban evolution, one based in a mid-Western city and the other in the

northern section of the East Coast. More specifically, Lloyd traces the evolution of

Wicker Park in the West Side of Chicago from an artistic, neo-bohemian neighborhood

during the early 1990s into a gentrified, “Silicon Valley”-like, and business-friendly (in

both regards, amenable to dot-com start-ups associated with the “New Economy” and a

“new” middle class known as the “young urban professionals”) by the late 1990s and

early-to-mid 2000s. Greenberg follows the transformation of New York City as a whole

since the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, with an epilogue that briefly touches on New York

City since the events of September 11, 2001. In the process, she produces, so far as I can

tell, an extraordinary study that brings together the fields of urban studies, cultural

studies, and political economy. She traces the development of an urban neo-liberal

capitalist project that took root since the 1970s fiscal crisis which plagued New York

City. A part of the neo-liberal economic transformation of New York City has been the

cultural aspect, in which the city was effectively “branded,” or “re-branded.” The result

was and continues to be a city deemed safe for tourism and finance. Needless for me to

write here, the gentrification of New York City became easier.

By way of conclusion

With the above taken into account, how is research on the working conditions, not

to mention compensation and other issues, of New York City’s taxi drivers related to the

neo-liberal capitalist processes (i.e. “branding,” gentrification, pro-finance policies and

regulation, de-unionization, de-industrialization, etc.) that were and still are unfolding in

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the same city and other cities such as Chicago? The “branding” of New York City, in

Greenberg’s terms, effectively led to the obscuring of issues related to labor. Although

issues of political economy remained relevant in people’s everyday lives, the focus of

discussions and policies on those issues tended to be on trends within the finance,

insurance, and real estate (collectively identified by the acronym “FIRE”) sector. This

narrow, selective focus meant that the public would not be as informed about the issues

that workers face, taxi drivers included. Thus, attacks, threats, and other forms of hostility

against taxi drivers receive very little attention and spark very little outrage. Of course,

my statements only amount to informed speculation. Since Bhairavi and Ryan have

expressed some interest in a possible study in the future on the history of the New York

City taxi industry, such a study may reveal pertinent information.

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