[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Ah, the theme song from Taxi. For those of us of a certain age, the distinctive tune immediately invokes the opening credits of the late '70s, early '80s TV comedy, a simple New York yellow cab crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. The yellow cab has long been an iconic symbol of the city, equally identifiable to New Yorkers, other Americans, and international tourists. What a casual visitor might not realize is that the foundation of these iconic vehicles is actually a very complex market.

A taxi medallion is the physical certificate required to operate a yellow cab. Way back in 1937, New York City limited the number of medallions available for sale, making it a scarce commodity. Like diamonds and ocean for property, scarcity raised the value of medallions. In 2014, a New York City taxi medallion cost about $1 million. It's a hefty sum, but for generations, the medallions were really a pretty darn good investment.

Recent immigrants do what earlier generation before them have done. They faced predatory lending rates to access a medallion and enter leasing agreements to access vehicles, hard work, long hours commitment, they'd always ultimately been enough, but then Uber, Lyft, and a global pandemic that halted travel. Suddenly, the value of the medallion plummeted. Once worth nearly $1 million, the New York City permit is now valued at just over $100,000. This is Queen's local Augustine Tang.

Augustine Tang: I chose to inherit my father's medallion, thinking that I would inherit something that was my father's bread and butter. He was just so proud of owning a piece of New York, so I wanted to keep his legacy after he passed in 2015. My father was almost $530,000 in debt, and then I had to take it over, but I was just paying the bare minimum I can to bring it down.

Melissa: Facing unrelenting debt with no relief in sight, last month, New York City taxi drivers began a hunger strike to pressure city officials to restructure debt. Last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio and other city officials struck a deal that ended the drivers fast.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Under this agreement, drivers will experience real substantial debt relief. It will allow them to move forward. These drivers deserve our respect, our appreciation as all New Yorkers.

Melissa: The new plan includes restructuring outstanding loans to $200,000, which would cap debt payments at around $1,100 a month and the city will be guaranteeing all taxi driver debts. In the last relief plan, the city was not a guaranteer and some drivers would have been forced to pay up to $2,000 a month. Here to discuss the hunger strike and what was one is Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, the union representing the drivers. Bhairavi, thank you for being here.

Bhairavi Desai: Thank you so much, Melissa.

Melissa: All right, can you tell us a bit about the terms of this new deal?

Bhairavi: Yes, so we struck the deal with both the city and a company called Marblegate, which is a private equity firm, and it's the largest holder of loans in the industry. The deal is that the loans will be capped at no more than $200,000, meaning no individual will have a loan balance above that amount. You subtract from that $30,000, which is a grant from the city of New York.

That's coming out of a program that the city announced about seven months ago. That's all they had announced back then. We'll now apply that grant to today's terms, so the drivers would be paying off $170,000 at about $1,122 a month. The $170,000 will be under a city-backed guarantee, which means that if into the future, they're not able to make a payment, they do lose the medallion.

The bank is able to take the medallion back and resell it. If there's still a balance left on the $170,000, then the city makes up for it. The drivers will no longer be at risk of liens on their homes or on their bank accounts. They will no longer have to file for bankruptcy. They're able to get tremendous debt relief, a payment that is affordable, and protection against liens into the future.

Melissa: As we think about this and how you finally got here, I want to talk a little bit about a hunger strike as a strategy. I'm wondering where the initial impetus for that emerged.

Bhairavi: Well, this was more than a six-year campaign for us. Particularly, over the last three years, we've had nonstop actions. We've shut down the Brooklyn Bridge a couple of times, just halted traffic on the 59th Street Bridge. We've shut down the offices, banks, and just engaged in a tremendous amount of direct action. We were at City Hall for 24-hour protests. We reached over 1,000 straight hours.

We've reached the point where we'd already done all the direct action that's really imaginable. We'd built tremendous political support. The entire congressional delegation had been on our side. A number of city and state elected are on our side. We had popular support, but we still were not moving City Hall. We needed City Hall in order to engage the lenders in a three-party negotiation.

The hunger strike was really our last effort. We've done strikes in the past, never a hunger strike before. I have to tell you in 25 years, it was the most difficult thing that I've had to announce. You don't want to see your members have to engage in a hunger strike, but we were not going to lose this fight. We intended on giving it absolutely everything that we had. We needed to shock the consciousness for this city and the lenders to understand our sheer determination in winning this fight.

Melissa: Can you tell me how many people chose to take part? Your point about how difficult it was to even announce it, what some of that lived experience was. I certainly think you're right that it reflected the clarity of how dire the situation is.

Bhairavi: We had over 70 individuals take part in the hunger strike. We had a number of not just drivers, but there were elected officials. There were members of other organizations, and then just members of the public when solidarity went on like 24-hour strikes with us. A number of us did it for the entire 15 days. Some for 13 days, 10 days. The average age of drivers now is around 50 and a number of our hunger strikers among the drivers were in their early to mid-60s.

Some had pre-existing health issues like diabetes and heart problems. A number have thyroid-related issues. Your metabolism is already really slow. We were being checked on by the New York City Docs coalition, which is a volunteer organization. They checked on us twice a day. I myself as the head of the union received reports on how every hunger striker was doing. This was an operation where we had support.

This was very sensitive. This is not something that you can take on easily. There is months of planning that went behind it. People had to fill out a pre-screening health form. They had to go and have an appointment with their doctor. If they did not have medical insurance, we help to arrange those appointments for them. They had to really make a plan in terms of their medication, bring all the medication to the camp. We had to have medical backup ready.

I tell you, Melissa, as difficult as those 15 days were, we're now at a point of refeeding. You can't just go back to eating once you've ended a hunger strike. On average, the number of days that you've been on the strike, you cut those in half and that's how long it's going to take your body to really adjust. For some of us, it's going to take the exact number of days that we were on hunger strike. It's still going to be another week to 10 days before we can feel like our bodies have fully recovered.

Melissa: I know that there will be some. Whenever we start talking about debt relief, there are always some who will say that those who signed the loans, took out the debt are to blame. I want to hear for a moment again from Tang, who we heard from earlier in the segment about being sold a dream. Let's take a listen.

Augustine: They sold us saying, "Oh, invest in medallion, invest in the city, get into the middle class. This is your American way, American dream that you've been asking for."

Melissa: Can you help us understand what he means there? What's that dream that was being sold?

Bhairavi: The city of New York issues the medallion and they sell new ones through what's called an auction. You have to bid. It's not a lottery. It's actually an auction, so you have to bid higher and higher. The city sets what's called the opening bid. For example, in 2013, the opening bid was $850,000. If you had bid $849,000.99, you would have been disqualified from that auction.

Through the years, the city issues reports on the value of the medallion. A New York Times investigation found that they had fudged many of those reports. They inflated the value when they publicized it. Sometimes as much as by 11%. The city allowed in financial institutions that were not allowed to loan after the housing market crash. They were still allowed to loan to the drivers.

This was a real act of fraud by the city and in hand with a number of financial institutions and industry players that engaged in inflating the value. Many of those same city officials then allowed in Uber and Lyft without regulation. By 2014, you had over 45,000 Uber, Lyft cars. By 2018, you had over 85,000 Uber, Lyft cars versus about 10,000 yellow cabs that were operational.

Many of those same individuals by the way then went to work directly for Uber and Lyft. This was, to us, a real criminal conspiracy, has not been prosecuted as such at the very bare minimum. It was incredibly immoral and it set this crisis, which not only has led to financial ruin of thousands of drivers and their families but there were nine driver suicides throughout this tragedy.

Melissa: Do drivers have a fighting chance of survival given the realities of rideshare apps?

Bhairavi: Well, I think bringing down the debt to these numbers, yes, and the immediate timing gives drivers that chance of survival. There is still so much more to be done. The despair that drivers as an entire workforce have faced, whether they be yellow cab drivers or Uber and Lyft drivers themselves, is that full-time driving has really been destroyed by the Uber and Lyft business model.

It's a business model that is out to eradicate full-time work. They call it "gig work," which is all about part-timing a full-time job. It's reducing the income and you justify that reduction by saying, "This is only a gig. It's not meant to be a job." That's been the heart of the despair and they've done it by saturating the streets with vehicles. Yellow cabs get drowned out. Uber and Lyft drivers end up being placed in the back of the line for a dispatch because there are so many new people coming in. This is a moment for reset.

It's a reset on protecting full-time work. It's a reset on how we address issues of transit justice for the public and for the consumer base, especially around race-based refusals and around the rights of our customers who have disabilities. It's a moment to reset the economics where the workers are placed at the center and not the companies or the banks. There's a lot of work to be done, but this for us was the fundamental fight that would allow us to have that new day.

Melissa: Bhairavi Desai is the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. Thank you for joining The Takeaway.

Bhairavi: Thank you so much, Melissa.

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.