Strike-ish

So here's the question:

If a union calls a strike and significantly more members break the strike than don't, who are the scabs?

Taxi drivers are unhappy with the City's decision to equip cabs with credit card machines and GPS devices. The City says the two sides have already agreed on the issue and that the two fare hikes drivers have received in the last 2 years were part of the deal. Unable to get the City to renegotiate, taxi drivers decided to strike...sort of. Newsday.com reported:

While a report from the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade estimated that
more than 95 percent of yellow cabs were on the road, strike organizers
touted the work stoppage as a success. From the looks of it, though, it
wasn't too hard for anyone to get a cab.

Meanwhile, Bhairavi Desai, Executive Director of the Taxi Worker's Alliance (TWA), which claims to represent roughly a fifth of the city's 44,000 taxi drivers, also claims that 75% of all taxis were off the streets yesterday.

She has every right to claim whatever she wants. Union negotiations with the City have a long history of being played out in the press. Unfortunately, she looks pretty stupid claiming a massive disruption in New York City life when the reaction of the average person on the street is more like, "There's a taxi strike? Where?"

I didn't realize at first, but The City's decision to implement the contingency plan was a genius move. According to the Post:

Thanks to flat per-person fares, the average 2.8-mile taxi ride, which
normally costs $9.60 will earn a driver who picks up four passengers $60 - a
525 percent increase. The idea is to minimize the impact of the one-day
strike by making drivers an offer they can't refuse.

During the last strike, drivers who worked reported making triple and, in
some cases, quadruple their normal income. "I did the strike last time,
but I cannot afford to do it again," one driver told The Post. "There is too
much money to make."

So the contingency plan is pretty much a super strike breaking tactic/powerball jackpot, but the TWA thinks its a good thing. The best thing, actually.

Many organizers said success could not be judged by how many cars were
on the road or even if the taxi commission buckled under their demands."If
the mayor has to put in place a contingency plan, then the strike was a
success," said cabbie Billy Acquaire.

This seems like a pretty sneaky union if its real goal was to pretend to strike so that 95% of its members could pull in 4 times their normal daily wage. The only other possibility is that the strike was an unqualified failure. But that can't be the case, since Desai claimed the strike a success, proclaiming that, "Despite those poor, pathetic scabs, the streets were empty this morning."

Rhetoric-wise, that totally beats Bloomberg's, "We made a deal and we're going to stick to the deal."

So I'd say the scorecard is pretty squarely in the TWA's favor. If you can claim any number of strikers you want, ignore the fact that your strike was largely ignored, and set the bar for success so low that the City's outright bribery of your "scabs" counts as a victory, its pretty hard to lose.

Joe Torre should have taken a lesson from the TWA. If he had claimed that the Yankees had won 105 games and the AL pennant, and then said that being lowballed was really Steinbrenner's way of showing his appreciation, maybe he'd still be the Yankee manager.

So who are the scabs here? I've got it narrowed down to either the people of New York, who callously played into the hands of "Big City Government" by not realizing there was a strike going on, or Bhairavi Desai herself, who seems to be using this as an opportunity to shed her 12 year old girl persona and reinvent herself as a tough as nails union head. Too bad for her nobody noticed, not even her union.

Desai, right, just after rolling down taxi

window to avoid car sickness