NRI leads desi and other taxi drivers' strike in New York

New York, Sep 7 (UNI) An Indian-American played an important role in the just-concluded taxi drivers' strike in the city.

Bhairavi Desai is the sole woman in an industry, which is dominated by immigrant males. The city has around 45,000 licensed cab drivers and according to Ms Desai, nearly 60 per cent of them hail from South Asian nations like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

She was instrumental in forming the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, an advocacy group, in 1998. Taxi workers struck work the same year, protesting their working conditions and seeking higher fare. The strike then was considered successful.

Now their work stoppage on Wednesday and yesterday resulted in far fewer taxis on the roads than anticipated by the city administration, which seeks mandatory installation of GPS (Global Positioning Systems) equipment that includes a credit-card machine for fare payment.

Many cab drivers claim GPS invades their privacy as it tracks their movements, which could be monitored by authorities. They say that a five per cent processing fee for each credit card transaction is nothing but a wage cut. The GPS equipment, which also includes a monitor, generates heat worsening their working conditions. The monitor on the other hand, authorities insist, provides entertainment, information and advertising to the passengers.

Ms Desai is now more determined to pursue taxi workers' demands, even though it is not yet clear how the taxi strike affected the city life and whether the workers' demands would be met.

Born in India, she migrated along with her family to the US when she was less than ten years old. Her family settled in neighboring New Jersey in the town of Harrison and she graduated from Rutgers University in 1994 with a degree in women's studies.

The 34-year-old Ms Desai is well respected among Indians and other South Asians in the tristate area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. She was recognised as ''Top 5 Under 35'' South Asians in the New York metropolitan area. The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) honoured her with an award called ''Justice in Action.'' The Ford Foundation gave her one of its 2005 Leadership for a Changing World awards and the awardees were praised for bringing ''not only concrete gains to their communities but a determination to stand for justice.'' Biju Mathew, a senior member of the NYTWA, who has written a book on the taxi workers' plight, said the group comprises about 10,000 members now versus 600 when it was formed nine years back. He attributed the group's growth in strength and determination to Ms Desai's hard work.

Ms Desai said at a pre-strike news conference that she had spent the past three years in unsuccessfully trying to have a ''dialogue'' between the city government-run Taxi and Limousine Commission and the cab drivers. She made it clear that there was no question of agreeing to authorities' orders.

''If they're going to tell us that our voices should be silent, we're going to make our engines silent, because that's our power,'' she said shortly before the strike.

UNI