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A Personal Statement:

How SF Officials
Disrespect Our Labor
Or
It's Been A Long Time
Since Harry Bridges

by Dave Schneider

We have worth. We are entitled to dignity and to be treated fairly.

Here's some of the value of our labor:
We take folks to the doctor, train station, fancy stores and restaurants, the airport and out to party at the clubs. We even drive them to City Hall, although perhaps we should know better. A full time cab driver may drive 35,000 miles a year, carry in excess of 7,000 passengers per annum and pay the company about $25,000 annually. And that doesn't include the gas we have to buy.

And what benefits do we get?
Yup, when the Supervisors patronize us they call us the city's ambassadors of good will, but they treat us like trash and we don't have the benefits of other workers, like the employees of Sunset Scavenger.

I think I know something about human nature and how to treat people.
I helped bring Robert Kennedy to my college campus and stood right behind him during a speech. I did the same with Ted Kennedy. My roommate and I sheltered Stokely Carmichael when he came to town to speak. I've had federal judges and United States Senators confide in me.

I was into the Dalai Lama when I when I was nine before he became a popular religious icon.

Usually I keep these things to myself, but I am talking now to let you know how they really are at City Hall.

I helped start UTW, but it was really others, Mark Gruberg and Ruach Graffis and Dave Barlow and now Thomas George-Williams, Athan Rebelos and Bud Hazelkorn, with all their wisdom and work that have really been there for all of us.

I got a meeting with Willie Brown in May of 1997 and he committed to centralized dispatch but appointed Gavin to run his Taxi Task Force. Newsom says he's for the idea, but his support has been lukewarm.

But the recent Alioto-Pier, Peskin, Sandoval in-your-face-screw-you-drivers uncompensated rent hike was the biggest crippling con job since Willie put out the 500 cabs and didn't do centralized dispatch.

And did I mention the Board of Appeals just approved 69 more cabs even though there wasn't clear and convincing evidence that they were needed? I hate to say it, but Ruach was right when she testified it's a political game. In a prior newsletter she quoted Sgt. Reynolds about what might happen to the hotels when a taxi driver gets upset about the limos.

Personally I listen to Dr. Martin Luther King, who warned against violence, but if the Board of Supervisors and other regulatory agencies continue to ride rough-shod over taxi labor bad things could happen ... it's bad enough that they've trashed their ambassadors of good-will.

It's been a long time since Harry Bridges was in this town . . . maybe that's why most of the Supervisors (except for our usual labor supporters, Chris Daly, Tom Ammiano, Ross Mirkarimi and Bevan Dufty) and other city officials feel they can give us a tour of the short end of the stick. It's been going on for years. It's hard to have good will for people like that.

There's an old song with the lyrics: San Francisco open up your golden gate ... well they sure got the “gates” out of us.

Well, we have to organize. No one will give us anything. Maybe we could get a Cesar Chavez type or a Dr. King to help us. At the very end King helped the trash collectors in Memphis. He didn't treat workers like trash like the Supes do. Actually, we all have to be organizers and become a little bit like King and Chavez and party on for truth, social and economic justice and the American way, or whatever way it really is ...