The Year in Labor Strife

in order to demand better wages and working conditions. Employees walked out of John Deere plants in Illinois, Kellogg’s cereal plants in Michigan, Kaiser Permanente health-care clinics in California, and Nabisco and Frito-Lay snack factories in Oregon and Kansas. -19 appears to have lit a match beneath at least a decade’s worth of late-stage-capitalist tinder.

But perhaps the year’s most intense and longest-brewing labor drama, which transfixed New York this past summer and fall, was the battle fought by the city’s twenty thousand yellow-cab drivers. No matter how many rideshare apps that New Yorkers download, the yellow taxi will always be iconic: cabdrivers represent an especially vital strain of the city’s culture. More than ninety per cent are immigrants. In total, they speak a hundred and twenty different languages.

By 2018, the price of a medallion was less than two hundred thousand dollars. Rather than a sound investment, the medallion mortgages had become unpayable debts that drivers now expected to pass on to their children. “You could just see the panic among drivers,” Desai told me, recently. “I was getting calls in the middle of the night from drivers who were feeling suicidal—grown men just crying on the phone.

On October 20th, the drivers ramped things up. “We’d always had the idea of a hunger strike,” Desai told me. “Members had been bringing it up since 2020. I was, like, ‘That’s got to be the last action.’ How do you escalate beyond a hunger strike?” They began to starve themselves, in a hunger strike that lasted fifteen days. Seventy-eight people participated, including taxi-drivers as well as activists from around the city.

Good piece from widdikombe 👆👆👆.

But not unionization, unfortunately, as I've learned today.

Why are you framing labor activism as a disease?

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