24 MB MP3
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Chris’s Billboard
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The back of a taxi cab is as good a view as some of us get of the globalized workforce today. So what are we learning after the first polite inquiry, which is probably “where are you from???? Haiti, Nigeria or Lebanon comes the answer in Boston; in a New York yellow cab more likely it’s India, Pakistan or Egypt. “New Americans??? in the melting pot, we almost automatically conclude: lucky immigrants in the tradition of the Irish, Italians, Russian Jews and many others who drove taxis onto the first step of the up escalator. But the driver today, if you’re still listening, has another story to tell: no, he doesn’t own the car and he’ll never have $300,000 for the taxi medallion that makes the car valuable. He’s got cops on his tail, and family in need on the other side of the earth. On a lot of bad days, he’s losing money and facing a dead end. On Open Source: The third-world work force driving our first-class economy.
Biju Mathew
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Author of Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City.
Professor of business at Rider University.
Member of the Organizing Committee of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
[by ISDN from New York City]
Rizwan Raja
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New York City taxi driver.
[by phone from New York City]
Westy Egmont
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President of the International Institute of Boston.
[by phone from Boston]
Great idea for a show! Here’s a couple of suggestions…
Vivek Bald did a documentary called “Taxiwallah” some years ago on South Asian NYC taxi drivers.
You might also be interested in talking to Vijay Prashad, who I seem to recall wrote something about the taxi strike that occurred in the late 1990s (1998?), led by South Asian taxi drivers. As I recall, a woman was one of the chief organizers of the strike, though I forget her name.
Prashad teaches in Hartford, CT so he probably knows his way around Boston too…
Still, I haven’t read this book and am very curious to get my hands on a copy.
I suggest John McDonagh [NYC]. He is wildly entertaining and intelligent. I love New York cabbies!
Here are some “John McDonagh” related links:
“C.A.B.”
http://www.liteupbush.com/press.htm
“Radio Free Eireann”
http://www.wbai.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=354&Itemid=42
http://www.irishfreedom.net/
It would be interesting to compare the situation in NY and Boston to the unmetered zone system in Washington where there are no meters and no medallions. DC has a lot more cabs per capita than Boston. (It’s actually possible to hail a cab.)
Don’t know much about this topic but I’m looking forward to learning from tonights show.
I understand the way it works for a taxi driver in NYC is they schlep for another guy who has a medallion for a while and try to save some bucks to get one of his own. Then the lucky day arrives and he puts his money down and takes out a big loan, puts the medallion on, and then he’s in business. But the price paid is such that the guy can never really put any more money aside in savings. Finally, he thinks about retirement, sells the medallion, takes his gain, gets out of the business and retires.
Seems like the rest of us who’ve been here for a while do with a house.
Two taxis stories for ya – one in NYC, the other in Mumbai.
NYC – I was driving from Laguardia to downtown with a Brazilian taxi driver. We got talking about our jobs, and he explained her was a policeman in Brazil for 25 years before moving to the US. Soon, he began talking about how Brazilian cops were _real_ cops because they knew how to deal with suspects.
“How so?” I asked.
For instance, he said – child molesters and rapists. He explained that whenever he and his fellow policeman caught someone for a sex crime, they would give them a warning. If they were caught again, they took them “for a ride.” A ride consisted of a long gravel road, in which they were thrown out of the back of the truck at high speeds. Most “riders,” he said, did not get a chance to commit a crime again after being taken for a ride.
A few minutes later, NPR started talking about the Amadou Diallo case.
“shameful! Shameful!” the cabby screamed. “New York police are such brutes.”
Story Two – Mumbai, last March:
I was hanging out with a colleague and two of his friends in downtown Mumbai, and they wanted to go to a bar called Ghetto. Ghetto was at least a 20 minute drive away, so we hailed a taxi outside of the bar. “Hop on in, man,” an elderly taxi driver said to us, with an odd hipster American accent.
“Where you cats going?” he asked us. My friend Rohit gave him directions while I pondered his accent. The man was clearly Indian, but he’d picked up some unusual speech patterns in his time as a cabby, apparently.
“What is your good name, sir?” Rohit asked him.
“You already know my name, because I’ve driven you before, but you’ve forgotten it,” he replied.
“No, sir, I don’t think you told me the last time you drove me,” Rohit insisted.
“I will give you a hint — my name is the name of an American artist with an eye patch.”
“Andy, this one’s for you,” Rohit said, leaning from the front seat. “Who’s an American artist with an eye patch?”
“Uh…. Dale Chilouly?” I replied, baffled by the question?
“Dale who???” the taxi driver replied, shocked I blew the question. “Not that muthafucka. A cool Daddy-O with class, with friends like Frank…”
“Uh… Sammy Davis Jr?” I replied, suddenly connecting the dots?
“You win, my man,” he replied. “I look like him, I talk like him, I have the same glasses, I am Mr. Sammy Davis. So are you guys looking to by any hash?”
I nearly wet my pants laughing. Where on earth did this guy come from? Meanwhile, Sammy kept at it for the next 20 minutes, including demonstrating his ability to swear in Finnish, then explaining in dramatic detail as to why he was the best drug connection in Colaba, Mumbai’s oldest neighborhood.
Sammy’s comedy act continued as we drove north to Ghetto, but then things took a turn for the worse when he decided to talk about politics.
“The US blames Bin Laden for 9/11, so they bomb Afghanistan even though Bin Laden is not in Afghanistan? And why are they doing it? For the Jews, that’s why!”
All of us glanced at each other with that last remark. Sammy kept talking and talking, explaining why the war in Afghanistan and Iraq were both done at the behest of Israel. Rohit looked at me apologetically and rolled his eyes. I shrugged my shoulders and tried to brush it off. It seemed harmless.
But Sammy kept at it. Apparently he’d struck his own nerve, and he wouldn’t stop talking until he’d had his fill of anti-Semitism. “And you know what about 9/11? No Jews died that day, because they were all warned. Every Jew in New York and Washington was warned by the Israeli consulate that morning so they wouldn’t go to work.”
“But what about me?” I jumped in. I’d had enough.
“What about you, man?”
“Why the hell wasn’t I warned?” I demanded. “I mean, there I was in downtown DC, just blocks from the White House, and no Israeli consulate or anything sent me an email telling me to play sick that day…. So either that means you’re totally full of it or somehow I got on Israel’s Pay No Mind list! Whadya think of that, Sammy? Do you think they just forgot to leave me a voicemail or something? Why the hell didn’t I get that memo?”
I kept at it for a while, stunning Sammy into a relative stutter compared to his previous confidence. Meanwhile, my cab mates were laughing wildly, egging me on to put this small-minded hep cat in his place.
“You know, I just remembered something. Let’s not forget who else is Jewish – your main man, Sammy Davis Jr!”
“Yes, that’s true, ” Sammy replied, “but…”
“But what?” I continued. “Do you think he would have gotten the memo from the Israeli consulate, or do black Jews not count? This must weigh heavily on your conscience, I bet….”
Sammy finally shut the hell up.
-andy
Hey Baileyman, I was all set to jump in on air with your comment, but Biju beat me to it.
Almost forgot – Sammy let me record a brief podcast while riding with him:
http://www.andycarvin.com/podcasts/sammy.wav
It is revealing enough that sometimes immigrant cab drivers know my native city better than I do. And perhaps they appreciate my own pop culture, particularly things I never considered. Abouit 22 years ago, I was introduced to the homespun yarns of Paul Harvey by a Haitian cab driver. I’ve been a fan since.
I find that most immigrant cab drivers are friendly. It’s a shame that we can’t get the economics right. The the blame for a dearth of quality cabs and competition rests with local government. There should be more jitney services but local government won’t allow it. Medallions are a literal license to print money. We need to bust up the oligarchy that’s ruining and limiting the number of cabs in the city. Cab drivers unfortunately have gone on to defend medallion owners without considering the virtues of deregulation.
One strange observation that struck me as odd. Since medallions are so prohibitively expensive most cabbies own their own vechicles but not the medallions under which they operate. Such is the distorted economics of the Boston cab industry.
Another great show!
Amardeep, I put a line out to Vivek Bald but was never able to reach him.
And ksandre, John McDonagh is a great talker, but because of his schedule was going to be sound asleep 7-8pm.
Thank you both for the good suggestions though.