The New York City Taxi Rank-and-File Coalition: 1971-1977

ABSTRACT

The New York City Taxi Rank and File Coalition was a movement active in the New York City taxi industry from 1971 through 1977. While the group had varying numbers of active members in its six-year history, primarily young white drivers in their twenties and thirties, it also included a number of middle-aged drivers who had previous union experience. Its many accomplishments included a monthly newspaper called The Hot Seat, weekly meetings in lower Manhattan, a statement of purpose called 10 Taxi at the Crossroads, and a vote tally of more than a third of the rank and file in the AFL-CIO Local 3036 union elections of 1971 and at least 20 percent in 1974. This study examines the question of what impact the rank and file coalition had on the overall evolution of the fleet driving industry in New York City as it developed from a commission-based  system, in which drivers shared a percentage of their meter bookings with the fleet owners, to a leasing-based system by the early 1980s.

KEYWORDS:

• Rank and file
• The Hot Seat
• coalition
• taxi work
• class-consciousness
• taximeter
• labor

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Joshua Freeman, Joe Grossman, and Vicky Youngman for their thoughtful comments and criticisms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The taxicab industry has a unique lexicon of terms. ‘Breaking the Ice’ refers to the first fare of the day or night shift. Drivers ‘riding the ghost’ during the 1930s meant that they rode empty with the meter on in order to bring money into the company as a means of assuring continued employment (Garvey, n.d., p.1).

2. While these are obviously estimates, fleet drivers suffer a good deal when there is a fare hike. Firstly, there is a loss of in number of marginal passengers; and secondly, there is a drop-off.

3. While fleet garages created mini-companies within the larger fleet in order to reduce liability, Biju Mathew describes how brokers attained profit margins of close to 100 percent by bundling fleet medallions and selling them at the price of an individual medallion to a mini- fleet (Mathew, 2005, p. 65).

4. Tom Robbins, who later went wrote a eulogy in the Village Voice in 2006 for Leo Lazarus and became a successful journalist, was the shop chair at Dover Garage on Hudson Street in the West Village. He and Jane Mt. Pleasant, the Cab Trans chair, were blacklisted.by the union. In addition, the grievance complained that the union was unwilling to intervene in the firing of Morris Miller, a black union activist, at the 55^th Street Garage.

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Richard Schlosberg

Richard Schlosberg taught Sociology at Brooklyn College. He holds a doctoral degree in Sociology from The City University Graduate Center and recently received a master’s degree in History from Queens College. His research interests are labor history and the sociology of work.