Mother Jones
On Wednesday, taxi drivers, local
elected officials, and their allies gathered outside New York City Hall
to announce the beginning of a hunger strike. They
are protesting a plan announced last month by the de Blasio
administration to help taxi drivers reduce their debt burdens—a plan
that the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, the 21,000-member group leading the hunger strike, considers insultingly inadequate.
As a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times investigation
established in 2019, lenders, medallion brokers, and city officials
spent years taking advantage of a scheme to inflate the prices of the
taxi medallions that let New York City drivers operate cabs. The
victims were the mostly immigrant cab drivers now left with hundreds of
thousands of dollars of debt. There have been three suicides by
owner-drivers in recent years.
I spoke with two of the roughly dozen hunger strikers a few minutes after they stopped eating. Zohran
Mamdani, who came to New York from Kampala, Uganda, at age seven, wore
two pins on his lapel: the red rose of socialism and another reserved
for members of the New York state assembly. He has represented a
northwest Queens district since January.
At 63, Richard Chow is more than 30 years Mamdani’s senior. After moving to New York in 1987, he bought his taxi medallion for $410,000 in
2006. He still owes almost all of that money because of interest
payments and the need to take out further loans to buy new cabs. His
brother, Kenny, bought his medallion for more than $750,000 in 2011. Crippled by debt, he died by suicide in 2018.
On Wednesday, taxi drivers, local elected officials, and their allies
gathered outside New York City Hall to announce the beginning of a
hunger strike. They are
protesting a plan announced last month by the de Blasio administration
to help taxi drivers reduce their debt burdens—a plan that the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, the 21,000-member group leading the hunger strike, considers insultingly inadequate.
As a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times investigation
established in 2019, lenders, medallion brokers, and city officials
spent years taking advantage of a scheme to inflate the prices of the
taxi medallions that let New York City drivers operate cabs. The
victims were the mostly immigrant cab drivers now left with hundreds of
thousands of dollars of debt. There have been three suicides by
owner-drivers in recent years.
I spoke with two of the roughly dozen hunger strikers a few minutes after they stopped eating. Zohran
Mamdani, who came to New York from Kampala, Uganda, at age seven, wore
two pins on his lapel: the red rose of socialism and another reserved
for members of the New York state assembly. He has represented a
northwest Queens district since January.
