A Change in TAC ... tics?

There were three new faces on the Taxi Advisory Council on Monday who are likely to mean a change in direction. Until now, the TAC has pretty much been an owner's council. But the addition of Rua Graffis, Tara Housman and Tone Lee seems certain to challenge that dynamic.


Ms Graffis (Left) is a leader of the United Taxicab Workers (UTW) and has spent over thirty years fighting for driver's rights. She replaces non-medallion holder not on the list, Timothy Ajaegbu, who regularly missed council meetings.





Mrs. Housman (Middle photo) is a medallion holder who also takes a driver's point of view. As she pointed out at the meeting, medallion holders can also be drivers. She replaces Laurie Graham who routinely gave Yellow Cab a second vote.

Tone Lee is a leader among the drivers at the airport. He replaces Dmitry Nazarov who was a lease driver at Luxor Cab and has bought his own medallion. Nazarov, who was supposed to be representing drivers on the list, voted with President John Lazar of Luxor Cab absolutely every time.


All three of the new councilors have regularly attended and spoken at TAC meetings so that they are already up to speed. 


When you add another recent addition, Richard Hybels (owner of Metro Cab who is well-known as a maverick that sometimes sides with drivers) to the mix, the council promises to be much more evenly balanced than it has been in the past.


Council Business


The council voted to have Chair Chris Sweis and Vice Chair Barry Korengold continue in their positions for another six months.


Driver's Fund


The main subject for discussion was, what to do with the drivers fund?


This was the first time that the council has seriously discussed the issue and it was primarily a brainstorming session. The councilors generally agreed that the sum of money (currently $1,462,500) was too small to pay for medical or retirement benefits. Some ideas put forward for the fund's use were:

• Scholarships for the children of drivers.
• Catastrophic insurance.
• Benefits for injured or traumatized drivers who needed time off from work.

Councilor Barry Korengold introduced a plan to use a 25 cent drop fee to build the fund more quickly but the drivers could not use their share unless they were vested for 5 years.

Christopher Fulkerson liked the idea in general but thought that the fund should be invested in an IRA that drivers could access whenever they wanted.


Tone Lee wanted to set up a lottery that would pay $100 to fifty drivers every two weeks on the provision that they showed up at TAC to collect it.

In the end, the council voted for a motion make by TAC member and general manager of Desoto Cab, Athan Rebelos, to make certain that the funds would be managed by the beneficiaries (i.e. the cab drivers) and not the MTA.

Town Hall Meetings: Final Speeches

With Matt Gonzales (standing in front of Mike Spain) making a surprise Monday appearance as a sub for Hansu Kim, the presentation of reform plans came to a close on Wednesday December 9, 2009.

Gonzales, Spain and Giuseppe Carvelli all spoke in favor of auctioning off taxicabs - though Gonzales said that he could accept fixed price sales. Their ideas are basically similar so I'll just mention a few points. Arguments in favor of auctioning cabs claim that auctions will:

• Allow older drivers to exit the business.
• Move the List or allow for a faster turnover of medallions.
• Allow drivers to build up equity.
• Allow for the possibility of making a profit off their investment.
• Give medallion holders the freedom to sell at any time.
• Raise revenue for the city.

In Spain's version, revenue would also be raised for a drivers fund.

There were two other ideas in their presentations that I found new and interesting.

Gonzales said there was no real reason why a loan for buying a medallion had to be for 15 years. It could just as easily be for 30 years like the mortgage on a home. In that way, the new medallion holders would have more money to spend on themselves than show up in some other projections. In other words if a loan only cost them $1,000 a month, they could live much better than they could if loan costed $1,800.

Spain, saying that he'd borrowed the idea from Hansu Kim, proposed a voucher system for drivers that could be used toward the purchase of a medallion at an auction. For instance if someone had been a working driver for 20 years he or she would get a voucher for $250,000. If a medallion sold for $400,000, the person would only have to come up $150,000 of his or her own money to compete.

Driver Peter Kirby, who is on the list, had a similar idea saying that drivers should be given credit or money for the time that they had spent on the list in event of an auction.

Driver Athan Rebelos introduced a plan that would create two classes of medallions: fleet medallions that would be prohibited from picking up at SFO and would be used primary for answering radio calls; and individual medallions that would operate much like medallions do now. Both classes could or would be auctioned off under various restricted conditions. The money raised from the auctions would go for taxicab regulation and enforcement, a general city fund and a medical and disability fund for cab drivers.

A great deal of thought and work went into preparation and presentation of all the various plans. I haven't had the space or time to do them justice here. You should be able to find copies of them from the Town Hall meetings archive at:

http://www.sfmta.com/cms/ctaxitownhall/ArchiveofMarchandApril2009TaxiTownHallmeetings.htm

or by contacting:

• Director of Taxis & Accessible Services
  One South Van Ness Avenue, Seventh Floor
  San Francisco, CA, 94103.
• Phone: 415.701.4400.

The Independent Contract - 5

I think of "tremendous minds" as belonging to people like Verdi or Goethe or Einstein who create beauty or expand our knowledge of life, not to some geek who figured out a new way to shaft people. But there is no denying that Robert Bork's interpretation of the Independent Contract was brilliant. His decision made it possible to wipe out 150 years of labor history merely by calling a thing by a different name.

Desoto Cab still had a few union people driving for them when I worked there so I became very aware of the difference between their status and mine. The union drivers were guaranteed a minimum wage, had paid vacations and sick leave, couldn't be fired without cause and didn't tip. I, on the other hand, could lose money (although I never did.), could be charged for unfilled shifts if I took a vacation or missed a day because of illness (which I also never did. Rather than pay Desoto for nothing, I passed my diseases on to my customers.), and could have "my lease cancelled" for no reason at all.

Little by little, the charming, silver-tongued Marvin had talked most of the union drivers into signing lease agreements. My favorite story was that he told one union man that he could keep his paid vacations and the rest of it even if he became a lease driver. "Why pay money to those damn unions?" Marvin asked him. The driver couldn't think of a reason so he signed the Independent Contract. Shortly after that, he took his yearly vacation. When he returned, the sucker discovered that Marvin had cancelled his lease.

Two of the teamsters still working at Desoto were Bob Franklin and Tom, whose last name I'm ashamed to say that I've forgotten. He suffered from a degenerative disease similar to MS and was a tireless worker despite his affliction. Bob introduced me to some of the top people from both the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO but they were unable or unwilling to help us because they were fighting just keep what they had during the Reagan era and they'd already lost in court over the Independent Contract.

We decided that the only way to attack the contract was to gain "workers rights." In order to do this we drew up a petition to that effect and brought it over to Rua Graffis of a group called the Alliance to polish the final wording. The idea was that the Alliance would help us get signatures. Once we had signed up more than half the drivers, we intended to bring the petition to the Board of Supervisors and, hopefully, get them to put a measure on the ballot stating that cab companies had to give drivers "workers rights." If our plan worked, it would have been possible to organize a union.

I thought that it would be very difficult to get the petition signed. There have always been a lot of drivers, like my good friend Murai, who liked the supposed freedom of the lease and didn't want to become employees. I also thought that many drivers would be afraid to sign and that it would difficult to explain our idea to foreign drivers who didn't understand our laws.

For the safety of the drivers, we decided to try and get the signatures at the airport. The first night we showed up, most of the drivers were Indians, Pakistanis and Sikhs. I didn't know how many of them spoke English or if they'd even talk to us. I would have been happy to get 10 drivers signed up.

I nervously walked up to a Sikh and handed him the petition. He silently looked at me and then slowly read the petition. He asked me for a pen and signed it. He gave it to another Sikh driver, who read it and signed it. The two of them then explained the petition to a couple of other drivers in their own language. Both the other drivers signed it. When we left the airport a couple of hours later, we had signed up most of the people in the lot. Three weeks later, with Bob and Tom doing most of the heavy lifting, we had signed up more than half the working drivers in San Francisco.

I thought that when we added the signatures that the Alliance had no doubt gotten we would have at least 75% of the drivers on the petition. But I couldn't get ahold of Rua. For some reason she wasn't returning my calls.

However, the magic number was 50% so I got together with Cliff O'Neil, who was the first president of the UTW and knew Supervisor Roberta Achtenberg. The year was 1990. We'd hoped that she would sponsor the legislation. In fact, she was very gracious to us and enthusiastic about our idea. "Let's get the ball rolling," she told us when we left. Cliff also lined up Supervisor and future District Attorney Terence Hallinan to write the bill.

In short, it looked a like a done thing. But I was new to insider politics at the time. Weeks went by without any action. I kept calling Cliff who didn't know what was going on either. After a couple of months, I stopped by to visit him and he told me that the legislation was dead. Achtenberg was still interested but no one else was. Terence Hallinan suddenly found the idea, "too complicated." The supervisors had been told that the cab drivers of San Francisco did not want employee rights. They wanted to be independent contractors. The supes did not want to meet with us. They refused to look at our petition.

I had a thought. I called up Rua Graffis and asked her what had happened to her signatures. "We will decide what the cab drivers of San Francisco want," she declared royally and slammed the phone down on me.

I later found out that Rua had helped sabotage "employee rights" on one other occasion. When the Democrats held their convention in San Francisco in 1984, then Mayor Dianne Feinstein had offered to give the cab drivers "employee rights" if the Alliance did not protest at the Moscone Convention Center. However, Feinstein made the mistake of letting an assistant make the call. The Alliance turned Dianne down because she didn't talk to them in person. Instead Rua marched around the convention hall protesting Feinstein with about 10 other people - thus giving a sound bite to the greatest union buster in American history, Ronald Reagan.

Since I didn't want to waste my time on a politics of absurdity and impotence, I decided to follow the old tried and true adage, "if you can't lick 'em join 'em." I went down and put my name on the list to become a medallion holder.

The last few years, I've been thinking of Rua with fondness. If it hadn't been for her, I might still be a lease driver bashing my head against walls.

Players & Plans: The UTW & The Asian Law Caucus

Before examining this proposal, I should admit that there are two reasons why I can't pretend to be objective:

1. Money for the plan would come out of my pocket. It would treat other medallion holders and myself as if we owned companies instead of just medallions and tax us as much as $10,000 per year.

2. The UTW went to Supervisor Chris Daly's back door before the people in the taxi industry even got a chance to look for more reasonable and creative solutions to the benefits problem at Town Hall Meetings.

The UTW and the Asian Law Caucus (ALC) mainly want:

1. Health insurance for the drivers.
2. Retirement for the drivers.
3. Enforcement of laws against illegal limousines.

Well and good. I agree. In fact we medallion holders are already paying $1.5 million (or 5% of our incomes) to (among other things) help fight bandit limos - who also steal rides from us.

The ALC does make several statements that I can agree with:

• Non medallion drivers, many of whom are immigrants, are low paid, forced to sign "independent contracts" which deny them the right to unionize and are exploited in numerous ways.
• These exploited drivers must wait for as long as 15 or 20 years in order to own a medallion.
• Once a driver owns a medallion his or her life is changed dramatically by an income that effectively doubles.
• In addition to whatever they make driving their cabs, medallion holders earn around $2,000 per month by leasing their taxis out when they themselves are not working.
• "The dream of holding a medallion inspires many taxi drivers to stay in the industry and maintain good driving records."

Well and good. It's all true. The disagreement starts with the UTW's financing plan. They want to charge medallion holders an additional fee of from 20% (ALC) to 50% (Supervisor Chiu). This is a tax rate many times higher than any company or corporation pays for employee benefits.

The reasoning to justify such outrageous fees - if reasoning is the word - starts with the above mentioned facts and then goes bonkers. George Orwell probably would have called the UTW's arguments double-think - in his kinder moments. Many of their other rationalizations are just plain false.

• The $2,000 that these poor, exploited drivers stayed in the industry for up to 20 years to earn is magically transformed into "unearned income" by the UTW. Apparently all those years of toil and strife should gain drivers nothing but a chance to pay the bills for people who haven't yet paid their dues. It's OK for those abused immigrants to dream but not too much.

The ALC also likes to load it's arguments. The word "immigrant" mysteriously disappears whenever medallion holders or fees are mentioned although a substantial number of the holders who would pay these fees are indeed immigrants.

• The $2,000 is treated as a huge pile of money by the ALC that claims that imposing extortive fees "will encourage medallion holders to actually drive their vehicles ..." This is a variation on a bogus factoid constantly yammered by Rua Graffis of the UTW who once claimed that medallion holders stayed home "eating pizzas" instead of driving.

This is nonsense! Where do these people think we're living - San Francisco Del Mar, Mexico? Studio apartments here rent for $1,500 a month. Even if there wasn't a driving requirment, we'd need to work. But there is a requirement. If medallion holders don't work, they lose their medallions. Personally, I work about 50 weeks a year just to tread water.

• The purest piece of double-think, however, is the idea that the plan will give medallion holders an "incentive to retire." This in turn supposedly would result in an "exit" strategy that is lacking now.

Think and think about this. The medallions holders would pay 20% to 50% of their incomes to finance not only retirement plans but other benefits for thousands of people. Any such plan would pay them back cents on the dollar. Maybe I just have a strange sense of humor but wouldn't we be better off putting that $4,000 to $10,000 into our own plans? As for the "exit strategy" - another joke. Under the UTW's plan, holders would be able to save little if anything and would cling to their jobs even more desperately than they do now.

As a former insurance underwriter, I think the main flaw of this and other proposals like it is that it distributes the cost among too few people. Usually the rate of insurance is spread among tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. This was the case back in the day when the Teamster's union provided benefits for San Francisco's cab drivers.

But, the ALC and the UTW want to stick less than 1,500 people with the bill. This means that San Francisco's medallion holders would be charged a rate five or ten times higher than any other group pays to provide similar benefits. As such, the fees would be punitive and oppressive.

However, one aspect of this proposal is true. It would speed up the waiting list. Few drivers, immigrant or otherwise, would be willing to spend 15 years being abused by the companies only to be exploited in turn by the UTW, the Asian Law Caucus and the City of San Francisco.