Bhairavi Desai

"The primary role of a leader in a mass organization is to produce a framework for the workers to engage through, in which they can meaningfully participate and build every part of the organization, from its campaign ideas to benefit plans, from its decision-making model to the organization's shape and structure."
- Bhairavi Desai, Executive Director, New York Taxi Workers Alliance

Read Transcript from November 18, 2005 Leadership Talks Archive

Join Leadership for a Changing World on Friday, November 18 at 1 pm ET, for a live, online interview with Bhairavi Desai, Executive Director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, and a 2005 Leadership for a Changing World award recipient. In addition to answering your questions, Bhairavi will discuss her successful organizing efforts in a multi-ethnic, male-dominated industry.

Driving a taxi is among the most dangerous jobs in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Other challenges include a lack of health-care coverage, workweeks that average 60 to 70 hours and pay that can be less than half of the minimum wage. More than 90 percent of the drivers of New York City's familiar yellow medallion cabs are immigrants from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Most of these workers are new to the United States and many have been unaware of their rights and reluctant to speak up for themselves to improve their working conditions.

Four years after graduating from Rutgers University, Bhairavi Desai co-founded the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), the organization she now heads. The drivers, Desai says, "reminded me of the town in which I grew up, where I learned to struggle, fight hunger and poverty, and see the dignity of the working class."

Desai's efforts today flow from an historic taxi drivers' work stoppage in 1998 that she was primarily responsible for organizing. For one day, 40,000 drivers parked their taxis and refused to work in New York City. This was the first time in 30 years that taxi drivers had quit work to draw attention to unfair regulations and often-difficult working conditions. That strike was the public face of the organizing Desai had begun years earlier, and the catalyst for what is now the NYTWA, which has more than 6,000 members.

The NYTWA won an historic victory in 2004, when New York City established the first living-wage standard for taxi drivers, who receive 60 to 75 percent of the additional revenue generated by a fare increase -- the first in eight years. After the 1996 increase, before the NYTWA was founded, drivers only gained a 14 percent share.

Desai plans for a future in which the group is a federation of taxi driver organizations spanning the country, from New Jersey to California. Desai says that "NYTWA will continue to stand tall as an independent, solid, democratic, and principled organization."

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Bhairavi Desai Leadership for a Changing World profile