Introduction:
The following editorial letter first appeared on the Taxi-L website and appeared in Toronto’s Taxi News, [June 2007, Vol. 22, No. 06] with the permission of the author.
Original Editorial Title:
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Chicago cabbies suspicious of City's eagerness to 'help'
The Chicago City Council's offer to help taxicab drivers -- per Alderman Pat O'Conner's resolution calling for fare hike hearings without the usual drivers' petition -- is a milestone and historic first!
Wow, the cabbies are finally getting a break from City Hall. Sun Times reporter Fran Spielman reports that "cabbies were surprised and delighted to learn that aldermen were responding ....”
She didn't report that those of us cabbies who know and remember are and rightfully should be suspicious.
We're surprised and delighted and- suspicious. Better take a good, long, hard and cold second look. Be suspicious. Be very suspicious.
It is highly likely that this seemingly kind offer from City Hall is no more than an attempt to preempt a possible industry-wide outcry and concerted action -- petitions, demonstrations, marches, maybe even targeted strike actions in critical transportation points like O'Hare, Midway, museums, tourist hot spots, hotel cab stands and dispatch service.
It may be no more than a ploy by City Hall to buy time so that the recent changes to rules and regulations that DCS has been working on in secret can be rammed into place. Hmmmm!
City Hall's offer to review a fare increase without the taxicab drivers' petition is a first, but it is not the first time anyone offered help to ease the plight of taxicab drivers -- not just about fare rates, but also the seemingly predatory, deliberate mismanagement and misdirection of the taxicab industry by the City -- for the simple purpose of increasing the flow of taxicab drivers' and owners' cash into the city coffers.
Some of you may recall in the mid-nineties when things got really hot, the Teamsters Union -- the truckers -- showed up and offered to help. We felt the love, we felt the power.
We had rallies, demonstrations, speeches, organizing drives, the whole works. We were going to be saved from the mob-like clutches and iron-fisted control of the City.
We were finally gonna be a union! Fair fares, fair rules, fair regulations, and a level playing field in matters of City law, a kinder and gentler administration of the taxicab industry. A new age was about to dawn. The Teamsters offered to represent us and actually held a few “negation sessions” with the City via Caroline Schoenberger, Commissioner Reyes’ predecessor.
Then they went back to Teamster Hall and the Taxicab/Teamster marriage disolkved just as quickly as it seemed to have materialized. Poof, gone!
All the promises turned to dust. The taxicab organizing intitiative was 100% pre-empted – dead on arrival.
What really happened? Someone (from within City Hall itself, it is said) explained to the seemingly all-powerful Teamsters that if they continued to support the taxicab movement, not a single teamster-driven truck would be allowed to load or unload at McCormick Place or possibly anywhere else in Chicago.
And at that time, truck and container traffic at almost all Chicago entry points was growing in leaps and bounds. Business was booming fro the Teamsters.
The Teamsters, tough and powerful as they may be, ran off like screaming little school girls. I mean no disrespect to school girls! The Teamsters sold us out, thanks to the not-so-kind-and-gentle extortion by City Hall.
And oh yes, at that time the Teamsters were the undisputed number one contributors to the Illinois Democratic Party’s election coffers. Something smells here. Can you guess what it is? Be suspicious. Be very suspicious.
Taxicab drivers were left alone again, left to their own devices. The old rule continued, “Shut up, pay your lease, you have no rights.”
We ended up getting a fare increase, but we paid dearly for that increase – some of the toughest and most stringent rules came with the higher meter rates –to fulfill the City’s Prime Directive – get the money, get the money by hook or get the money by crook.
The notion that the taxicab industry could be organized to determine its own fate – to t ake up responsibility for our own profit or loss; to makesound business decisions based on real-world economic and business conditions, to improve service to our riders, to raise the standards of our work environment by our own effort, to gain that long sought-after “equality” and “equity” that workers in many other industries strive for – was not even given a decent burial.
Hopefully, the taxicab industry in not going into summer reruns this time around.
Respectfully submitted by
Wolfgang J. Weiss
Member, Board of Directors
Chicago Professional Taxicab Drivers Association
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Post Script: How quickly we forget. How quickly those who are willing to pull the same wool over our eyes over and over again take advantage to mislead us down another dead end.
It does not matter if it is out of naivety, stupidity or malevolent design, the result is the same -- another dead end.
Are we going into winter re-runs now?
Same on Mr. George Lutbellow. The truckers will get him.
