Chris Hayashi & the Wisdom of Solomon

Director of Taxi Services Christiane Hayashi has had an extraordinary impact on the cab business that goes far beyond anything you might reasonably expect from an administrator.

Her uniqueness become evident to me the first time I saw her at a Medallion Holder Association (MHA) meeting in 2009, shortly after Mayor Gavin Newsom had threatened steal all the taxi medallions and sell them to cover San Francisco's $500 million debt.

What struck me about her was the absolute absence of any sense of snobbery or superiority of rank.

Maybe I can best get my idea across by contrasting her behavior to that of MTA Board Member Bruce Oka who also came to the meeting. Oka was all smiles but he also let us know how important he was. He told us that he was in a hurry and could only stay a little while. He also hinted at inside knowledge of Newsom's plans that he couldn't quite express to us. In short, he acted like people of position usually do when glad-handing the lower classes.

Hayashi, who undoubtedly knew more about Newsom's plans than Oka did, simply sat down next to a few drivers and talked to them like they were fellow human beings. I've rarely seen anybody who held power over others act so modestly.

How Not to Do Politics.

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 As I was walking by the small honk-a-thon prior to last Tuesday's MTA Board meeting Tariq Mehmood approached me with a smile. This surprised me. He usually waves his arms at me and shouts things like:

"Don't talk to me!" or "Leave! You don't belong here! You are not a driver!" or "Don't you laugh at me!"

He's been acting thus ever since I wrote this post about him. Naturally, I assumed his sudden conviviality stemmed from a desire to publicize some scheme or other in my blog. This proved to be the case.

Mehmood proudly pointed to the line of cabs circling City Hall and told me that he was planning a major strike.

"You mean you're not going to pick people up?" I asked. "Uber will be happy to hear it."

"This time we'll shut the city down!"  He said with a wide-eyed grin.

"Then maybe they'll charge double."

How Not to win the Hearts and Minds of the People.


Of course it would be impossible to seal off a city with so many ways in and out. (Is he going to block off Palmetto Ave, Brotherhood Way, Alemany Blvd, Brunswick St, etc?). What would be possible would be to shut down the bridges. This has been done before and the results of such an action would follow a predictable path.

1. The cabs would block the streets for a couple of hours.

2. Since no city can tolerate such behavior, the police would eventually tow the offending vehicles and arrest and fine or discipline the drivers.

3. The traffic would soon return to flowing (or not) as it had before.

The only lasting effect would be to alienate the public even more than those cab drivers who turn down credit cards. There is nothing that people hate more than being punished for something they didn't do. It would turn people, who might be sympathetic, against the cab driver's cause.

Think of what Critical Mass has done to win love for the Bicycle Coalition.

In short, blocking traffic would be monumentally stupid, meaning that Tariq will probably do it.

What cause?

And there would the problem of explaining why Mehmood and his minions would deliberately cause massive gridlock.

One certainly couldn't tell from the above protest. As usual Tariq substituted personal attacks for reason. Why should Hayashi, Heinicke and Ed Lee resign? (Ed Lee????) We don't know. A guy with a bullhorn kept kept shouting that "we" were, "against electronic waybills, backseat terminals ..." But would this win over the hears and minds of a public that's been stuck on the Bay Bridge for two hours?

 The gentleman in the photo below didn't know if he was against the noise or not.

"It depends what the honking is about?" He said.

"Basically, they're underpaid and don't have benefits," I told him. "It's not fair."

"I can see that," he said. "On the other hand, whoever said that life should be fair?"

"Wasn't that Spinoza?"

"Maybe ... Spinoza's complicated."



A Brilliant Protest: But How Not to Get a Message Across.

I liked this one. In fact, I wish I'd thought of it. I've got to hand it to organizer Brad Newsham.  He's quite the showman and he paid for the photographer out of his own pocket. This stunt did indeed get the attention of the press. The soundbites were there for the taking. But what were they?

An online paper The San Francisco Appeal quoted Newsham as saying that the MTA has been "abusing" taxi drivers, who he says are losing business to the private car service Uber.

"We've got an absolutely demoralized workforce that's being looted," he said.

Will Reisman of the San Francisco Examiner paraphrased Mark Gruberg of the United Taxicab Workers as saying,

"Drivers are upset about onerous credit card fees ..." and "... government overregulation ..."

Gruberg also pointed out that "the SFMTA gets a 15% cut" of $250,000 taxi medallion sales and "... hasn't invested any of that money back into the industry."

Catherin Al_Meten of SF Grandparenting Examiner described signs as reading, "We won't be your cash cow" and "Fire Mirakarimi."

There are no shortage of messages. In fact, there are too many. Some are ridiculous (Mirakarimi????) and others cancel each other out. Mark does't like "overregulation" but Brad wants to regulate Uber out of business. And, what are we to do about "abused" and "demoralized" cab drivers? Do we need group therapy?

Sorry. But there is no center in any of this, no concrete plan of action with which the non-cab driving public can identify. Given this potpourri of soundbites, the media focused on what most disturbs them.

Flikr descibed it as a "Protest of proposed credit card charges for "cabbies.'"

KRON 4 News asked on facebook, "Do you think 'cabbies' should have to pay credit card charges?" The count was tied at 4-4 at last ... count.

Reisman devoted most of his article to discussing credit card processing fees and the MTA's plan to cap them at 3.5% - about which Gruberg continues to harp, despite the fact that not taking credit cards is the one act for which the public most hates taxi drivers. Reisman writes,

"While the drivers and companies bicker about credit card fees, taxi passengers will continue to feel the impact of the argument. Some drivers, angry about absorbing the extra costs, are still refusing to pick up passengers who don’t have cash."

The journalist concluded with a story about a cab customer who was spit at by a "cabbie" when he tried to use a credit card.

Newsham's cab caravan was good theatre but, in the end, the mixed messages may have done little except feed negative "cabbie" stereotypes. The protest that the public is really paying attention to is the one the anti-credit card genius's are holding every day. Uber must be pleased.

How Not to Talk to High Ranking Officials.

Brad Newsham finally scores points.

But, first, Brad shoots himself in the foot.

Director Heinicke isn't going anywhere.  He's just been reappointed. Furthermore, for better or worse, when it comes to taxis, Heinicke is the most influential member of the MTA Board. Since, we can't get rid of him, maybe we should try to free his mind instead.


The self-proclaimed "most powerful and great leader the ..." taxi "... industry has ever seen" throws a "spontaneous" tantrum.

In recorded history, has anyone ever advanced a cause by embarrassing, insulting or threatening powerful officials?

Supervisors Lack a Resolution

The Board of Supervisors failed to pass a resolution "opposing proposed taxi fare increase under consideration by the Municipal Transportation Agency in the absence of improved taxi service" yesterday because it did not have unanimous support.

Sponsored by Supervisors Scott Weiner, Malia Cohen and Mark Farrell, the measure required a unanamous vote because it had not been discussed in a committee.

We didn't realize that the public would be able to address the subject until the Board was already in session so only Mark Gruberg of the United Taxicab Workers, Barry Korengold of the San Francisco Cab Drivers Association and myself argued against the resolution.

Gruberg said that we needed a raise because we hadn't had one in eight years; Korengold mentioned that the SFMTA Board had failed to implement Open Taxi Access which would immediately improve service to the neighborhoods; and I commented on the weirdness of Democratic politicians, the party of labor, refusing to back a cost-of-living raise to working people. We all expressed a sense of unfairness at being punished for problems beyond our control.

The Board, however, had already decided the issue behind closed doors - this time to our advantage. Supervisor Weiner said that the resolution did not have the necessary support so no vote was taken and the measure was tabled until the Board's next meeting.

Weiner went on to say that the resolution was not intended as a criticism of cab drivers but that we needed more taxis on the street. He just thought that any meter increase should be coupled with peak time cabs.

Supervisor John Avalos, from my District 11, true to his labor roots, spoke against the measure saying that taxi drivers needed a fare increase.

Supervisor Malia Cohen, from District 10, remained adamant in her belief that there should be no meter increase until cab drivers start picking up in the Bayview.

The True Story of the Town Hall Meetings: A Radical Approach, A Revolutionary Plan

We people who took part in the Town Hall Meetings, who developed the Pilot Plan, know that we did things new and extraordinary. We looked at an industry where almost everyone was at odds with everyone else, where no two cab drivers could agree on anything, where there were at least three sides to every issue, where even the taxi companies needed two associations instead of one because they couldn't get along with each other and we forged a consensus, a compromise plan that gave something to every single faction and is backed by the vast majority of people in the taxicab business.

Even more remarkable was the fact that we got the SFMTA to sign off on the plan instead of stealing all the taxis and selling them like Mayor Newsom originally wanted.

This was an amazing, unprecedented accomplishment and I'll be proud to be associated with it until the day I die.

I was therefore stunned when I read press coverage describing a Pilot Plan that had nothing in common with the one we actually created.

Of course we all now know that the UTW, the one taxi group that refused to go along with the plan, had embarked on a campaign of misinformation, disinformation and downright lies for the benefit of local journalists.

It must also be said that many of these "journalists" were only too eager to be sucked in. I believe that this was mostly because Mark Gruberg and the UTW fed the press clichés with which they were familiar (evil owners and oppressed workers.) On the other hand, these pundits didn't exactly raise a sweat trying to discover the truth behind the lies.

My favorite one of these characters was Barbara Taylor of KCBS who reported that the plan called for auctioning off medallions and would lead to the taxi companies owning them all. I called her on the phone and got involved in the following conversation:

• Me, "You got the facts wrong."
• BT, "That's your opinion ... what I do is collect opinions. You have your opinion and they have their opinion."
• Me, "But all you have to do is read the document."
• BT, "I'm a very busy woman. I don't have time to read."
• Me, "But what you said was false."
• BT, "That's your opinion."

Then she hung up the phone. When I e-mailed her a copy of the Pilot Plan she spammed it.

We've been on the defense ever since. I think it's about time we change this dynamic and tell the world what the Pilot Plan really is and how it came about.

The first thing to know is that Plan is the result of negotiations involving every group in the taxicab industry that took place over a period of months and included: drivers on the medallion list, drivers not on the medallion list, medallion holders, taxi company personnel, the UTW, the MHA, the SFCDA, Director Chris Hayashi and members of the public.

Therefore the Pilot Plan is NOT Mayor Newsom's or the SFMTA's or Malcom Heinicke's or the taxi companies' or the "owner's" or Chris Hayashi's. The plan is a product of negotiation, it's a compromise, between all these people and groups as well as working cab drivers. It's our plan.

Coming Soon: How the Pilot Plan's provisions were arrived at.

The Pilot Plan: What it is. What it isn't - Unfair???

There has been so much misinformation written in the press and disinformation spread about the Taxi Town Hall Meetings that I think it's necessary to review what went on there.

There have been two main attacks leveled against the meetings: that they were unfair and that the outcome was fixed or predetermined.

The first assertion is ridiculous and the second is false.

1. Aside from the famous 175 hours of meetings, there were at least twenty presentations given and anybody who had a thought or a question was encouraged to speak. Mark Gruberg of the UTW, the main critic of the meetings, not only spoke for three or four hours all by himself but his idea for a "driver's fund" is now part of the plan. Furthermore, Director of Taxis Chris Hayashi went far beyond the normal call of duty and talked with taxi drivers at the airport, at cab lots and anywhere else she could find them.

2. I think that these meetings were supposed to be fixed. They were supposed to be the usual dog and pony shows designed to manufacture consent. Only, thanks to Hayashi, they were not.

• This is the plan that was supposed to be shoveled down our throats. It comes from Malcom Heinicke, a director of the MTA board.
• This is an outline of the Pilot Plan we developed at the Town Hall Meetings. (The final version is still being drafted.)

Those of us who took part in these meetings know how absurd these attacks against the Town Hall process are. We sat and watched the plan being drawn up from scratch on a blank slate. Chris Hayashi started out by asking the people at the meetings what they thought should go into the plan and then wrote in the suggestions.

Over a period of four months, the plan constantly changed and evolved as people debated various points or came up with a fresh ideas. The plan remains a work in progress and will be subject to change even after it is accepted by the MTA. The final version won't be drawn up until we see how the various parts of this pilot program - like the fixed-priced sale of taxis - play out in the real world.

I doubt that workers from any industry of any kind have ever been given the chance express themselves more freely, openly, thoroughly and, yes, fairly than the people at these meetings. I think that few groups of people have ever had more say in reforming the future of their business.

Currently, Hayashi is working to find the best financing possible for the drivers who might want to buy a medallion under the new plan. She's decided to hold a Town Hall Meeting for all the banks and lending institutions that are interested - on Friday, February 12th from 2pm to 5pm.

I asked her if it was okay if I attended.

"Of course," she told me, "It'll be open to the public. We don't do anything in secret around here."

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.

Chris Daly Withdraws His Charter Amendment

Supervisor Chris Daly shocked a room full of cab drivers this morning when he passed around a note saying that he had withdrawn his charter amendment regarding taxicabs. There was no explanation given so the matter is open to speculation.

One possibility is that he realized that the Two-thirds Rule predicted by a certainly blogger was indeed working against him. In fact, my sources tell me that the UTW was outnumbered eight to four at the general Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday June 30.

This may have opened Daly's eyes to the reality behind the UTW's claim to represent most of the cab drivers in San Francisco. In fact, the UTW was itself divided over Mark Gruberg's insistence on putting medical benefits in the proposal because this kept the SFCDA from backing it. Instead the SFCDA lined up alongside the MHA against Gruberg.

At least one medallion holder who had attended the meeting thought that the rest of the Board had turned against Daly on the issue.

Daly may also have been influenced by City Controller Ben Rosenfield's financial analysis of the amendment which stated that "the estimated costs of the proposed benefits represent 30% to 100% of the (taxi) industry's gross revenue. If the taxi industry absorbed some of these costs, it would need to increase revenue ... possibly by increasing fares, or by some other means."

Another way to put it might be to say that the amendment wasn't financially feasible.

In any case, Supervisor Daly appears to have seen the writing on the wall and it spelled out defeat.

For the rest of us, count it as one victory in a long war.

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.

Players & Plans: Jane Bolig Comments & Clarifies

Another out of the box thinker is Jane Bolig, President of the Board at Desoto Cab. She wants to transfer the medallions but instead of selling them to individuals, she thinks they should be sold to "all the drivers and employees in their companies ..." Bolig says that this could be done through federal programs called Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP) that have worked successfully for almost 50 years and "carry enormous tax advantages."

I'm not clear as to how this would work but, having once helped put together a paper with Jane in the distant past, I'm certain that she can provide a detailed and logical argument. Some features of her proposal are:

• Both individual medallions and the List would continue.
• Companies could continue to contract only with medallion holders but when the owners retired they could sell their companies to an ESOP.
• K medallion holders could continue to work them as usual. When they retired or died the medallion would be given to the next person on the list just as they are now. Or the holder could sell the K medallion to an ESOP.
• New medallions would go to people on the list.
• The City could charge a fee for each medallion sale.

The plan is idealistic and would solve more problems than any other plan out there. Non-medallion holding drivers would benefit far more from this proposal then they would from anything else that has been offered so far. Unlike the UTW or the Asian Law Caucus, Bolig actually addresses the fundamental weakness of the ordinary driver's situation - a lack of power or control.

It's a great proposal and could make medallion holders, ordinary drivers and the City all happy. Now all Jane has to do is convince her fellow owners to go along with her idea.