When a cab driver gets in an accident, as 33-year-old Makhan Singh Dabb did two months ago, some taxi companies charge the driver a fine, regardless of insurance coverage or who was at fault. Friendly Cab, Dabb’s Oakland employer, imposes fines ranging from $250 for a minor scrape to $750 for a severe smash-’em-up, depending on the damage done to the taxicab.
It wasn’t too bad in this case: a busted signal light and a big hole in the bumper, an estimated $960 repair job for which Friendly was required to be insured. Dabb, a tall, turban-clad man with a thick accent, says he figured he’d be fined $400 tops, but the company’s roadside manager promptly quoted him $750.
The driver was understandably upset. His weekly haul, after paying leasing fees known as “the gate” to use one of Friendly’s taxis, was $500 to $550, with a fifth of that going to support his wife and daughter back in India.
Dabb protested, so the manager said he’d go discuss it with Friendly Cab’s owners. When the manager returned, the cabbie recalls, he laid out his bosses’ offer-you-couldn’t refuse: Dabb would now have to pay a $2,000 fine, plus a $1,000 security deposit on the taxi. He would have to retake a driver-safety class (another $50) that he’d completed the previous month. In addition, the company would raise his weekly gate from $550 to $625.
The manager then told the stunned driver he had a few days to think about it. Soon thereafter, Dabb says, he received a call from the company. His taxicab lease had been terminated, and if he wanted to keep driving he’d need to sign a new one and comply with all of the above conditions. Dabb, in essence, had just been fired. “Drivers do not have any rights,” complains the cabbie, who now works for Veterans Cab. “You have to obey.”
If Friendly’s cab drivers don’t have any rights, that’s because — until the National Labor Relations Board ruled otherwise this week — they were legally considered contractors, not employees. This distinction has been at the heart of an ongoing labor dispute between local cabbies and Friendly’s owners, husband-and-wife team Baljit and Surinder Singh. The recent NLRB ruling may, for the first time, give the cabbies some clout.
It was precisely situations like Dabb’s that prompted Stockton’s Wahid Aslami to quit driving for the Singhs more than a year ago and get a job with a relative small-timer, six-car Oakland firm Golden Cab. Aslami has been on a mission against Friendly Cab, arguing, among other things, that the Singhs arbitrarily raise gate fees whenever they feel like it. As the Express has reported previously, Aslami helped rally his fellow drivers last year, petitioning the NLRB to let them form a union, and organizing a twenty-day strike that led to a city-brokered compromise with Friendly’s owners.
But those efforts were a fare to nowhere. According to Aslami, little changed. Support from Oakland’s Teamsters Local 70, which was assisting the drivers in their bid to unionize, stalled out, and Friendly Cab never lived up to the terms of the written compromise. But this time, a revived East Bay Taxi Drivers Association, consisting of more than a hundred cabbies, hired an attorney to formally petition the NLRB, and enlisted prominent Berkeley attorney Donald Jelinek, to sue Friendly and other Singh-owned cab companies for fraud, breach of contract, retaliation, failure to provide insurance and meet safety standards, unfair competition, and race discrimination. “We did not want it to get to this point,” says Aslami, “but the level of corruption, the way they victimize the drivers. … We all decided enough is enough.”
Many of these complaints seem inevitable in an industry where the work is typically performed by independent contractors with no health insurance, sick leave, vacation, or even, as some argue, rights. For most companies the system isn’t a problem, says Alfred Lagasse, executive VP of the national Taxicab, Limousine, and Paratransit Association. “Ninety percent of all taxi drivers in the United States are independent contractors,” he says. “The driver keeps all funds that he earns, so there is more incentive to get out there and earn money. It’s a more efficient system.”
But Friendly’s drivers say this arrangement has left them open to mistreatment. Many, for instance, complain about the arbitrary gate increases, pointing mostly to Surinder Singh, whom the cabbies view as a particularly unjust manager. “She would not talk to you, would not give a reason,” says Mohammad Zadran, a leader in the drive against Friendly. “If we said we cannot afford [the gate increase], she’d say, ‘Leave the key and go.'” The cabbies’ lawsuit, filed in August, also alleges that drivers of Indian ancestry were charged a lower gate (the Singhs are also Indian).
Aslami, an Afghan, says he paid full gate fees, even though his assigned cab lacked air-conditioning and heat the entire time he worked for the Singhs. And even when their vehicles were out of commission for repairs, the cabbies say, they had to pay their gate anyway or lose use of the car.
Independent contractors can’t unionize, but the drivers say Friendly’s owners in fact treat them as employees, making their situation unique. The Singhs, for instance, keep a percentage of fares paid by credit card or voucher, dictate how cabbies must dress, forbid distribution of individual business cards, and dispatch rides without telling drivers the final destination or how the passenger intends to pay.
The NLRB has rejected most past unionizing efforts by taxi drivers, says Lagasse of the taxi trade association. But this time, the panel sided with the cabbies.
“Although the question of employee status versus independent contractor status for taxi drivers has vexed the board for nearly thirty years, the pervasive control exercised by Friendly Cab Company leaves no room for puzzlement,” the cabbies’ attorney, Robert Bezemek, argued in his NLRB brief.
But it’s a long road from this initial win to the drivers’ final destination. The cabbies must next vote in an NLRB-supervised election on whether or not to unionize. If they do form a union, they’ll have to agree on contract demands.
That’s if Friendly cooperates. The Singhs can appeal last week’s ruling and, even if they lose, can stall the process by contesting the union election or hauling the case into federal court. “It can drag on for years,” says David Feller, a retired UC Berkeley law professor.
Rather than waiting it out, can’t the drivers simply go with another company, as some have?
The problem for the cabbies is that the Singhs have a substantial lock on the Oakland taxicab market. Thanks to a loophole in city policy that regulates cab operations, the Singhs own nearly sixty percent of Oakland’s taxi permits, or medallions — double the city’s stated thirty percent maximum. The owners amassed 184 of the 311 available medallions by buying up rival companies, a practice the city no longer allows as a way of obtaining permits. Besides Friendly, the Singhs now own or manage Metro Taxi, Yellow Cab of the East Bay, Greyline, and California Cab — all of which are named in the lawsuit. The company’s monopoly, its critics say, has allowed it to exploit drivers.
Lagasse wasn’t aware of any other situation in which a company used the strategy to exceed city limits on cab permits. “It wouldn’t matter what name they’re under — [the city] would see through it, of course.”
Of course. But that wasn’t the case in Oakland, and Larry Carroll, administrative overseer for the city’s taxis, says it’s too late to fix the loophole. “We have been advised by our legal staff that there is just no way to break up the monopoly,” he says. “The Singh family legally obtained the permits.”
City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, a labor leader who helped mediate last year’s compromise, says he’s not sure there’s anything else the city can do. “I don’t know that the city has power to interfere,” he says.
Aslami, however, argues that the city has clout, if it chooses to use it. “City officials are neglecting their duty to really go after these people,” he says. “They put their own interests first.”
Indeed, the city has had numerous chances to revoke permits from the Singhs. In 1996, the drivers held a two-day protest and complained to Oakland’s public safety committee that Friendly had refused to install protective shields in its cars as required by law. When the issue was not resolved, the drivers returned to Oakland leaders for help, raising additional concerns about faulty brakes, shoddy repairs, and lack of insurance for drivers.
In 1997, the city manager’s office threatened to revoke seventy percent of Friendly’s medallions as well as its fleet-operating permit after an investigation revealed that the cabs were not properly insured. After Friendly appealed, the city balked and let the owners off the hook.
In 1998, the Singhs missed the deadline to renew their fleet permits, but again were allowed to continue operating at full strength.
Steve Lovell, the officer in charge of taxi detail for the Oakland Police Department, notes that the city has missed additional chances to weaken the monopoly. By law, a cab cannot sit idle for more than ten days or its medallion will be revoked. The Singhs’ Yellow Cab currently has only 40 approved drivers for its 51 permits, according to Lovell, meaning that eleven cabs are going unused. The policy, he adds, is very difficult to enforce: Since medallions are assigned to individual vehicles, an operator could simply rotate cars to skirt the letter of the law.
Last year, Lovell discovered an Oakland Friendly Cab in Richmond with weeds growing out of the hood, “clearly a violation of the ten-day rule,” he says. He wrote the car up for revocation, but the city gave the company its medallion back. “Politically,” says Lovell, “they have very strong ties.”
Those ties might include Leo Bazile — a former Oakland councilman and two-time mayoral candidate — whom the Singhs hired as their general manager last year. Baljit Singh referred all questions to Bazile, whose only comment was, “Let the drivers tell their story and the public will make their opinion.”
If the city had really wanted to get involved, it could simply have looked to its own taxi ordinance, which says drivers must be “employees” of the cab companies. “The ordinance was intended to make sure a driver is connected with a company,” says administrator Carroll. “We don’t care whether they’re employees or independent contractors.” Attorney Bezemek counters that Oakland should have enforced this distinction as a way of ensuring “fair and reasonable” taxi service for its residents.
Despite past failures, the drivers insist they are going to the mat on this one, paying for the lawsuit and NLRB process out of their own meager incomes. Between the Singhs’ monopoly and the drivers’ contractor status, the cabbies have had little hope of improving their situation — until last week. “Now we have a lot of support; everyone is joining us,” says Zadran. “This is the beginning of the war.”
