The Year in Labor Strife

During the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the social side effects of the virus started to become more apparent. Amid continued mass demonstrations against lockdown measures, and worldwide civil unrest, the U.S. population broke out in hives of labor activism. Workers at corporate behemoths like Amazon and Starbucks attempted to form unions, with mixed results, and workers who were already unionized went on strike in order to demand better wages and working conditions. Employees walked out of John Deere plants in Illinois, Kellogg’s cereal plants in Michigan, Kaiser Permanente health-care clinics in California, and Nabisco and Frito-Lay snack factories in Oregon and Kansas. (The energy even found its way to this very publication, where, this summer, newly unionized employees reached a deal after two and a half years of negotiations.)

What was happening? Stephanie Luce, a labor scholar at CUNY, explained that COVID-19 appears to have lit a match beneath at least a decade’s worth of late-stage-capitalist tinder. “Wages have been mostly stagnant since the economic crash of 2008,” Luce said, adding, “People have been seeing the quality of their jobs deteriorate.” Then came the virus, and, all of a sudden, a dismal situation became life-threatening. Health-care and manufacturing workers found themselves ordered to work double shifts in dangerous conditions. Earlier this month, six people died at an Amazon warehouse, in Illinois, and another eight workers were killed at a candle factory, in Kentucky, after the facilities were hit by a tornado. (In both cases, employees allege that they were not allowed to leave work before the storms hit.) Meanwhile, corporate profits have continued to roll in. Luce explained the mindset of many employees this year: “They’re thinking, This company is making millions—billions—during a pandemic. Management’s not coming in—they’re in their second homes, while I’m here risking my life. For a lot of people, that was it.”

Also notable, according to Luce, was the outpouring of public sympathy: everyone from President Joe Biden to Danny DeVito voiced support for the striking workers, and that encouraged the workers to hold strong, while also putting additional pressure on managers to bend. Money poured into online “strike funds,” and Redditors flooded the Kellogg’s job portal with fake applications. While this assistance, too, was not entirely new, Luce said that, for many members of the public, COVID-19 provided a wake-up call about the country’s weak labor laws. More people were paying attention. “The pandemic made it clear that this is not an individual problem people have with their employers—it’s a collective problem,” Luce said. “If someone is not allowed to take a paid sick day when they’ve got COVID, that’s not just their problem. It’s my problem, too.”

New York City had its own versions of these battles. Although the city is no longer a factory-dense place, it is full of underpaid essential workers. Demonstrations began in 2020, after COVID hit, but ratcheted up in year two of the pandemic, as employees protested about months—and sometimes years—of indignities. In January of 2021, after six workers at the enormous Hunts Point Produce Market, in the Bronx, had died of COVID-19—and after another estimated three hundred employees had contracted the virus—market employees went on strike, ultimately winning their biggest pay increase in thirty years. The city is also home to the largest active strike in the country: this past October, some of the more than three thousand unionized student workers at Columbia University marched into the classroom of the university’s president, Lee Bollinger, demanding better pay, dental care, and job security. A few weeks ago, the student workers received an e-mail from Columbia’s human-resources department, threatening to replace them if they continued to strike. (The strike is ongoing.)

But perhaps the year’s most intense and longest-brewing labor drama, which transfixed New York this past summer and fall, was the battle fought by the city’s twenty thousand yellow-cab drivers. No matter how many rideshare apps that New Yorkers download, the yellow taxi will always be iconic: cabdrivers represent an especially vital strain of the city’s culture. More than ninety per cent are immigrants. In total, they speak a hundred and twenty different languages. And they are yet another group whose struggles preceded COVID. For the past several years, a subset of taxi-drivers known as owner-drivers have been trapped in a kind of modern-day debt slavery, struggling to make payments on loans that they took out to buy medallions—the permits required to operate a cab.

In 2011, I profiled Bhairavi Desai, the advocate and union leader for New York taxi-drivers, and my conversations with her opened my eyes to the intricate world of city cabdriver politics. The drivers work under a wide variety of employment arrangements: in addition to owner-drivers, there are fleet workers, who drive for a boss; livery and black-car drivers; and, these days, rideshare drivers, who drive for the apps. Their “union,” an organization called the Taxi Workers Alliance, which Desai co-founded, in 1998, represents all these groups, meaning that it’s not a traditional union at all—it’s more like a loose association of people in the business.

The taxi-driver debt crisis has its origins in the Bloomberg years, when the city came up with a plan to raise revenue by auctioning off medallions, the permits required to operate a yellow cab. Because there is only a limited number of medallions, in order to restrict how many cabs can operate on the street, the city was able to market the permits as a valuable, tightly controlled asset. Brokers, bankers, and speculators rushed in to buy them, creating a secondary market that closely resembled the housing bubble of the two-thousands—and, ironically, included some of the same players. The price of a medallion skyrocketed, jumping from around two hundred thousand dollars to just over a million, and lenders aggressively hawked the medallions to cabdrivers, many of them recent immigrants, who took out steep mortgages to acquire them, believing that they were buying a piece of the American Dream. But, by 2014, Uber had arrived in the city, flooding the market with competition. The value of the medallion collapsed, and cabdrivers were left holding the bill.

By 2018, the price of a medallion was less than two hundred thousand dollars. Rather than a sound investment, the medallion mortgages had become unpayable debts that drivers now expected to pass on to their children. “You could just see the panic among drivers,” Desai told me, recently. “I was getting calls in the middle of the night from drivers who were feeling suicidal—grown men just crying on the phone.” One of the first of many driver suicides occurred in February of that year: Douglas Schifter, a sixty-one-year-old black-car driver, parked his vehicle outside of City Hall and shot himself. He posted a suicide note on Facebook, writing that ride-sharing companies had destroyed his income, and that fines imposed by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission had left him mired in debt. Desai said that taxi-drivers renewed their organizing efforts that year around their economic plight. “Douglas’s spirit really called on us to take action,” she said. They began holding regular protests in front of City Hall, ultimately demanding that the city help refinance the loans at a manageable level, by guaranteeing them in case of default.

The pandemic plunged the taxi-drivers into an even deeper crisis. Under lockdown, their work dried up, and their income essentially vanished. Meanwhile, the medallion loans required payments of up to three thousand dollars per month. At the end of 2020, yellow-taxi drivers shut down the Brooklyn Bridge. Desai hung out of a cab’s sunroof, chanting into a bullhorn: “No more suicides! No more bankruptcies! Save the yellow cabbies!”

In March of 2021, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan to use federal COVID-relief money to provide drivers with loans of up to twenty thousand dollars. Many drivers considered the amount to be ludicrously inadequate. On September 19th, they escalated their protest, setting up camp outside City Hall. For more than six weeks, the area in front of the Renaissance Revival building became a miniature version of Occupy Wall Street. The drivers strategized in a cacophony of languages and picketed, holding signs that said, “Debt Forgiveness Now!” Their families created a community kitchen that served five thousand meals—rice, chana masala, naan—to attendees, and to the local homeless population. The protests had attracted a number of high-profile allies, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Chuck Schumer, whose father-in-law had driven a New York City Taxi. And yet de Blasio refused to budge.