His fares for the last two days were dismal and now halfway through the day, Khalid al Hag had only $20 in his pocket.
At this rate, he figured he would have to dip into savings to make his $520 weekly payment to the cab company for use of the car.
“I’m going to have to work at least 12 or 14 hours today and still I won’t get by,” he said, gulping down a meal so he could get back into his cab, which lately he has been driving seven days a week.
Other cabbies — independents who have to pay out of their pockets for gasoline and other expenses and benefits — flitted through the restaurant with the same laments. At $3.46 for a gallon of regular gas, high fuel prices are swallowing their thin profit margins.
“When gas prices hit the highs, some drivers have to give up the work unless they work really long hours,” said Prateek Sampat, who is waging a fledgling drive to organize Chicago cabbies. “They are spending $45 to $50 a day when they used to spend 30 bucks, and the margin of income is so tiny for the drivers even a few dollars brings down their income.”
The drivers’ distress is why Sampat thinks an effort to organize many of Chicago’s nearly 11,000 cab drivers, including 2,500 who own their own cabs, will succeed. Similar efforts are ongoing across the country.
The organizing efforts are more of a cry for rights and recognition waged largely on behalf of thousands of immigrants who have quietly slipped behind the steering wheels of most the nation’s cabs.
Why are cabbies the focus of organizing efforts? Taxis are today’s Ellis Island for many immigrants, statistics show. And cab driver is the first line of work in the U.S. for many without good language skills and without credentials to land easier, safer and better-paying jobs.
“We recognized the problems facing the drivers and we felt that we needed to help them raise their voices,” explained Sampat, who heads the taxi worker organizing project sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, and the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago.
What brought the Quaker and Islamic groups together in Chicago was a desire to help immigrants, who have suffered in silence, said Michael McConnell, a Chicago-based official for the American Friends Service Committee.
“We recognized the problems facing the drivers, and we felt that we needed to help them raise their voices,” he added. The Islamic group had begun working with the drivers over a year ago, and then the Quakers joined forces with them, he explained.
Their first pitch on the drivers’ behalf was at a City Council hearing last month where they asked for a gas surcharge and fare increase. The last fare hike in Chicago was in 2005. Soon after that, Chicago ranked 18th out of 23 cities in the U.S. for the price of an average cab ride, according to an industry study that city officials said still is relevant.
The organizers presented figures compiled from a handful of drivers, showing that the drivers were spending an average $44 a day on gas last month and were earning $6 an hour when all of their expenses were deducted.
But Ald. Thomas Allen (38th), chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Public Way, said he doesn’t sense any support within the City Council or from city officials for a surcharge. “Gas prices have kind of settled,” he added.
That hasn’t been the sentiment elsewhere, however.
This year gas surcharges have been tacked on to cab prices in Seattle; Pittsburgh; Fairfield County, Va.; and Las Vegas, according to news accounts and the Taxicab, Limousine and Paratransit Association, an industry organization.
Washington, D.C., and suburban Montgomery County, Md., also rolled gas surcharges into fare increases this year, and a surcharge is under consideration in Boston, said Hal Morgan, an official with the taxi industry group.
Sampat also turned over copies of a several cab leases to the city’s Department of Consumers Services, showing what the group described as overbilling and unexplained charges by cab companies. Bill McCaffrey, a spokesman for the department, said one lease appeared to have “infractions” and the others were still being reviewed.
The organizing drive’s ultimate goal is to bring Chicago, with the nation’s second-largest taxi cab industry, in line with New York and San Francisco, where taxi drivers have set up their own groups. And, the taxi driver groups add, scored some minor victories.
“It is a workforce that is highly organizable because the conditions are so horrendous,” Bhairava Desai, an organizer and executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
Her group, which is 9 years old, has about 8,000 members, of whom about 2,000 pay minimal dues, out of a total of more than 30,000 New York City cabbies.
Still, organizing taxi drivers is not easy.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said George Lutfallah, a former cab driver, who publishes the Chicago Dispatcher, a monthly publication. “You don’t get a lot of unity in the industry.”
Then there’s the problem, say drivers in Chicago and elsewhere, of getting cabbies of diverse backgrounds to work together. “There are some groups we can’t reach, like the Russians and the Brazilians,” said George Williams, a German immigrant and driver who has been organizing fellow drivers in San Francisco for the last few years.
And then there’s the fact that many drivers find it hard to commit to a job they hate. While drivers say turnover is high and growing higher, city officials say there are no figures.
“Every day when I go home, I ask myself the same question, ‘When am I going to stop being a cab driver?’ And every day I say I’m going find something better, but I can’t,” grumbled Omar Shire, 29, a Somali refugee, who has been driving for the last three years in Chicago.
It was about 7 p.m and he was just over halfway through his workday. He had said his evening prayers, then eaten dinner at Banadir II, a Near North Side restaurant catering to Somali and other Eastern African drivers.
“I work 14 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s all I do,” he said, his voice rising in anger, his eyes wide. The city does not limit how many hours cabbies can drive.
Other drivers grumbled about hours spent in broiling hot cabs because they do not want to spend precious gas on air conditioning and of not daring to challenge cab companies’ fees for fear that they would be turned away.
They talked about having to keep money coming in, no matter how little it is. For Khalid al Hag, 37, who had been an elementary school teacher in eastern Sudan, that means coming up with money for people in his native land.
Besides sending money to relatives, al Hag, a driver for the last 10 years, often provides for others in need in his Sudanese village. But he is sending them far less lately, if anything at all. That is why, he said, he must work harder.
Until recently Sohail Ghaziana had thrown himself into helping the taxi-organizing effort. He hoped if the drivers gain a collective voice, they would be able to improve their lot and his, too. Lately, he was paying $55 to fill his cab’s tank instead of $30, and he was taking home $400 a week, working 12 or more hours a day, six days a week.
It troubled him to find himself scraping by so miserably after 24 years of driving and to see others sinking along with him.
He finally quit and took a job with a limousine company. He expects to earn the same money “but with less hassles.”
“The drivers,” he said, “they just don’t care. They are not thinking about their future because they don’t want to stay in this business. But you don’t know how fast the time goes.”
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sfranklin@tribune.com
