MIDTOWN. Taxi drivers are still threatening to go on strike to stop the city’s plan to put a high-tech video monitor and GPS device in the back of every cab. But if the plan goes ahead as scheduled by the end of this year, Ron Blount thinks he’s seen New York’s future.

Blount, president of the Taxi Workers Alliance of Pennsylvania, led a one-day strike against a state-funded GPS system in Philadelphia cabs last May. But once that system was installed, the real trouble began.

“Any given day, about 10 to 15 percent of the cabs are out of service because of the malfunctioning of the GPS,” Blount complained. “When the system goes down, the meter goes blank, so the driver has to flat rate the customer and then go to the garage and wait for like three hours to get it fixed.”

The wireless system is regularly losing money in credit-card transactions, he claimed.

“The card reader is connected to the GPS machine, but the transactions sometimes don’t go through,” Blount said. “A week later, the driver finds out there’s nothing there.”

That’s led to continued labor unrest. Over the past year, Philadelphia cabbies have tried to keep the pressure on by staging “shorter strikes,” Blount said. “We would shut down for four hours, or we would shut down at the train station. It’s still not over yet. The last one was held on Dec. 13 — we shut down the airport.”

Blount founded the Philadelphia chapter of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance two years ago, after being inspired by the group’s director Bhairavi Desai. The 10-year-old alliance — with 7,250 members here — now has chapters in three U.S. cities, and it has assisted similar groups in 19 American cities as well as in Toronto, Sydney and Pakistan.Since the 2004 fare hike, “we’ve just had drivers calling us from all over,” explained Desai. “‘Hey,’ they say, ‘I want to build a taxi workers alliance.’

“In unity there’s strength,” Desai said. “At the moment, we’re fighting this GPS campaign. But some of our other goals include setting up an industry health fund and building a health and fitness center at Kennedy Airport.”

The group has yet to formally speak to the Port Authority about the JFK center, but Desai would like to put it in the airport’s holding lot. “There are 6,500 cabs going through there every 24 hours, and drivers on average wait about an hour and a half, two hours,” she said.

Desai is planning to get strike pledge cards signed by drivers starting next weekend: “We want to get our drivers lined up.”

Organized

Cabdrivers are labeled independent contractors, not employees, so they have no rights to form a union, collectively bargain contracts, claim workers’ compensation or get overtime pay. But over the next three days the Taxi Workers Alliance is hosting representatives from 22 driver groups to discuss founding an international organization of cabdrivers. The first session yesterday featured a speech by AFL-CIO president John Sweeney. Last month the alliance was welcomed into the city’s Central Labor Council.

http://ny.metro.us/metro/local/article/Taxi_drivers_stress_unity/7519.html