Immigrant Black-Car Drivers in New York
By Immanuel Ness

Until recently, independent contractors were considered professionals in business for themselves, carrying out services for multiple clients. However, in an effort to reduce labor costs, the practice of replacing employees with independent contractors has become widespread among businesses since the 1990s.

           
Among the growing industries involved in this new form of independent contracting, New York’s black-car industry—luxury personal transportation service—involves drivers who almost all are recent immigrants. Immigrants from South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and Central and South America have entered the black-car industry because they believe they can earn high wages. But black-car drivers increasingly are recognizing the job can be even more onerous than taxi driving. As a result, they are joining together to form a union with the Machinists to win a voice at work, a campaign that illustrates how unions can work successfully with immigrant organizations to facilitate both greater strength in numbers and rank-and-file solidarity.

Defying Stereotypes

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Because the black-car industry is so new to New York City, native-born drivers, with few exceptions, have not entered the industry in large numbers. South Asians account for at least 60 percent of black-car drivers and are sought out primarily because of their proficiency in English, which allows them to communicate easily with their upscale business clientele. While South Asian immigrants often are stereotyped as high-wage professionals or entrepreneurs, in reality, a large and growing number have limited formal education and are employed in low-wage industries. Even if workers are educated, they have few options but to take low-wage jobs.

Not only do black-car drivers make low wages, they must make considerable down payments to black-car operators before beginning work. Current drivers persuade car service owners to assist new recruits in obtaining the necessary auto loans and insurance. Typically, such financial arrangements are made through the black-car companies themselves, which frequently take “finders’ fees” or have advantageous arrangements with banks and insurance companies. Unlike the remaining “gypsy” cab drivers, black-car drivers have access to the money they need through a combination of savings, borrowing from relatives and loans from fleet owners.

But the appearance of wealth among workers in the industry is largely illusory, as they labor in virtual indentured servitude, working long hours for many years to pay off the loans, send money back home and survive in the city. Indeed, the term peonage may be more accurate in describing their situation than the term indentured servitude. The latter implies a contract with a specific time frame, while peonage refers to debt-coerced work with no real hope of release.

Machinists Organizing Campaign Among Black-Car Workers

The Machinists union spearheaded the organizing campaign among black-car drivers in the mid-1990s after the workers recognized their wages did not enable them to pay their bills, feed their families or send remittances back home to their relatives abroad.

Gathering under elevated highways and airports, where they often rest for a few minutes between Wall Street and midtown pickups, the drivers discussed their common job problems—and in sharing their desires to improve their working conditions, they often formed organizing committees at many black-car companies before approaching the union. One driver, recalling the organizing drive, noted the long lag between jobs gave workers ample time to debate ways to improve their conditions by organizing into a union. Since 1995, more than 5,000 drivers have formed unions to demand a reduction in fees assessed by the company.

In reaching out to this wholly new, unorganized labor force, the Machinists embarked on a highly centralized organizing drive without a competing local unit asserting craft, industrial or geographic jurisdiction. Further, no local unions could claim the right to represent these workers. While rival service-sector union leaders could admire or even covet the IAM’s extraordinary organizing efforts among the workers, no union—including the remnants of the old taxi drivers’ union—could claim a competing jurisdiction in this industry segment.

Together with the drivers, IAM created Local Lodge 340 exclusively for black-car drivers. Although the black-car organizing campaign was directed and financed by the national and district levels, there was no need to convince an existing local with other priorities to expend resources and take on the fight. The campaign, while centrally approved, took advantage of the autonomous organizing efforts initiated by rank-and-file drivers at car service firms, and the workers say this is the wave of the future.

In response to the post-Sept. 11, 2001, backlash against drivers from South Asian, Middle Eastern, Arab and Muslim backgrounds, rank-and-file workers began helping one another apply for working papers and green cards. In addition, the drivers have gained the support of New York’s union movement.

Union Resources and Worker Autonomy Behind Organizing Success

The success of the black-car union-organizing effort derives both from the militancy among immigrant drivers who demanded better conditions and from the existence of an established union that provided critical resources but did not interfere with worker control over the direction of the campaign. The IAM black car organizing model suggests success may best be achieved when unions provide resources to workers and at the same time grant them autonomy.

The majority of South Asian workers are Muslims from Pakistan, which is a factor in the drivers’ solidarity, but there is little evidence of tensions between Christian, Hindu and Muslim drivers. In addition to ethnic and national ties, the organizing victories arose out of a common work culture that stemmed from the oppressive conditions in the black-car industry. This shared culture of long and hard work, arbitrary treatment by dispatchers and agency abuses helped engender a class identity the workers and union acted upon. The new black-car drivers shared some ethnic commonalities, but more important, they shared a common work culture as super-exploited, so-called independent contractors who could barely eke out a living.

Machinist District 15’s organizing campaign among black-car drivers remains one of the largest unionization efforts in New York City’s private sector. The IAM recognizes the workers need collective union support to maintain drivers’ licenses, address employer and public discrimination, provide health care, respond to unfair ticketing by the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles and have a voice on the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission.

IAM’s support for the black-car drivers represents a successful union-based strategy for organizing workers in New York City’s new informal economy. The union effectively adjusted its structure to the new industrial realities and used both rank-and-file mobilization and NLRB actions to redefine and unionize a new workforce. This centralized yet participatory structure proved critical to the dramatic initial success and the bright prospects for organizing the majority of workers in the for-hire vehicle industry. IAM’s successful model warrants close scrutiny for potential replication in other cities and sectors.