Working

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From The New Yorker:

Tomorrow is Labor Day, and this weekend we’re bringing you stories about workers’ experiences and workers’ rights. In “Thin Yellow Line,” Lizzie Widdicombe profiles Bhairavi Desai, the organizer who founded New York City’s taxi-driver union, when she was just twenty-six; in “Dignity,” William Finnegan meets the fast-food workers fighting for a higher minimum wage (and inventing a new kind of labor advocacy in the process). Michael Grabell uncovers the conditions faced by poultry workers, in “Cut to the Bone,” and Jill Lepore recounts Clarence Darrow’s role in the labor movement, in “Objection.” Rachel Aviv takes us into the world of immigrant caregivers, many of whom leave their own children behind to look after kids here in the United States, in “The Cost of Caring.” Finally, in “The Kitchen Network,” Lauren Hilgers follows Chinese restaurant workers as they travel from their home towns in China to restaurants across the United States. Many of the sacrifices made by workers happen behind closed doors. These pieces open them.

. . . .

On Houston Street at Avenue A the other day, a woman stuck out her hand to hail a taxi. It was cold and drizzly—hyper-competitive cab-hailing conditions—but she was likely to have better luck than most people. The woman was Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a yellow-taxi drivers’ union. Desai, whose first name is pronounced “BEAR-avi,” is not a cabdriver, but she is a celebrity in the world of yellow taxis, and cabdrivers often recognize her on the street and offer her a free ride. A taxi swerved to a stop and Desai slid into the back seat.

“We’re going to LaGuardia,” she told the driver—who hadn’t recognized her.

“O.K., what airline?”

“Actually, we’re going to the main taxi terminal,” Desai said. “We’re going to the taxi lot to talk to drivers.”

The driver, a middle-aged African-American man named Robert Smith, seemed confused.

“I work for the Taxi Workers Alliance,” Desai said. “You heard of us?”

Smith nodded. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and pulled into traffic.

The T.W.A. first came to prominence in 1998, when Desai initiated a strike that, to protest new rules imposed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, kept most of the city’s twelve thousand yellow cabs off the street for a day. Since then, her group has grown, and it now claims fifteen thousand members, almost a third of the city’s licensed cabdrivers. Desai can often be seen on the local news, or at public hearings, making passionate arguments on behalf of cabdrivers that are seasoned with statistics and left-wing rhetoric. She is an anomaly in the male-dominated taxi industry (she has a degree in women’s studies and history from Rutgers). A girlish thirty-eight, she is five feet two, with big eyes and a high-pitched voice. She is of Indian descent, and, on this day, she wore a pink-and-yellow shalwar kameez, a yellow scarf, and a gray peacoat. She is a Mets fan and a soap-opera addict and once memorized the lyrics to every song Jim Morrison ever wrote. She can’t drive.

. . . .

The day the strikers’ wives pelted the scabs with rotten eggs and a strikebreaker and Irish ex-cop named Edward Casey cracked Jimmie Morris’s skull, the governor of Wisconsin called in the National Guard from Milwaukee. By the next morning, Friday, June 24, 1898, four companies of infantry, a battery of artillery, and a squadron of cavalry armed with rifles and Gatling guns had reached Sawdust City, also known as Oshkosh, where soldiers took up positions outside the gates of the Paine Lumber Company. The city and the company had been founded in 1853, when a man named Edward Paine arrived from Canisteo, New York. Now the place was run by his son, George. Even Oshkosh’s mayor was on George Paine’s payroll. By 1898, the two thousand German, Irish, Polish, and Danish immigrants who worked at Paine Lumber, the largest of Oshkosh’s two dozen sawmills, were turning out four hundred thousand doors a year, making Oshkosh, population twenty-eight thousand, the door capital of the world.

Jimmie Morris, who was sixteen, had been supporting his mother and six younger brothers and sisters ever since his father was maimed at a mill. He earned forty-five cents a day. The factory doors, Paine doors, were locked once the workers got in, at 6:45 a.m., and kept locked, except for a lunch break, until the guards came and turned the key, when dusk fell. “Why, gentlemen,” Clarence Darrow said to the jury, when the leaders of the strike were brought to trial, “the only difference that I can see between the state prison and George M. Paine’s factory is that Paine’s men are not allowed to sleep on the premises.”

The trouble had started that May, after workers sent Paine a letter demanding better wages, a weekly payday, the end of woman and child labor, and recognition of their union. Thomas Kidd, thirty-eight, the general secretary of the Amalgamated Woodworkers International, came from the union’s headquarters, in Chicago, to organize. Paine had been replacing men with women and children; by that spring, children made up a quarter of his workforce. Not a few had taken jobs once held by their fathers. Paine threw the letter in the wastebasket; he said he found it “unbusinesslike.” Some sixteen hundred workers went on strike. “Oshkosh is in the hands of a mob,” the mayor said. The sheriff deputized dozens of men as strikebreakers. After the Civil War, National Guard units had been formed, in Northern states, to deal with labor unrest; they were funded, in part, by donations from businessmen. But in Oshkosh the guardsmen turned out to be sympathetic with the strikers, and after less than a week the mayor sent them back to Milwaukee. The mills were closed.

Thirteen hundred citizens of Oshkosh attended Morris’s funeral.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker