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Why would anyone be happy working for peanuts?
So I’m sitting there at the intermission of the Stakeholders’ Workshop on December 8th when this African taxi driver comes smiling in my eyes and uninvitedly sits down opposite me at our discussion group’s table.
He doesn’t introduce himself but greets me as “Mr. McSherry” and says he wants to talk to me.
I tell him my name is “Peter,” not “Mr. McSherry,” and I ask him if he is an Ambassador, which, of course, he is. Then he addresses me as “Mr. McSherry” again and tells me how much he respects me. Indeed, I hear how much he respects me perhaps four or five more times in the next two minutes.
I tell him my name is “Peter” again, after which he begins calling me “Mr. Peter,” then, after two or three of these, he goes back to calling me “Mr. McSherry.”
I give up on being Peter.
Well, now who would have guessed it? It turns out that this Human Respect Machine wants to make an argument to me about why he should have his Ambassador converted, along with all of the Ambassadors that belong to his fellow travellers, who I’m already surmising are probably members of Asafo Addai’s ‘I-want-a-plate-for me’ club. The first premise of this fellow’s argument is that the Sun comes up in the West and the second premise is that the Sun comes up in the South or maybe the North. I forget which.
Anyway, having had only one hour’s sleep, I get impatient and cut him off and tell him the way things really are, and were in the past, and why it has changed, as, for example, because the City of Toronto has for the past 30 years used its taxi service as a form of welfare and its taxi drivers as a source of revenue for itself. I tell him that they’ve cut the business pie so often that there’s almost nothing left but what pays the driver’s costs of operation. So why will anyone go to work if it’s made to be any worse by cutting the pie yet again?
He tells me I’m 20 years out of date. That there’s lots of business out there, that he has three kids and owns a house because there’s so much business. He’s been driving since 1989, he tells me, and he deserves a plate, he says.
What does he think all of the 7,000 shift drivers like myself deserve? I wonder. Or the lessees? Or the plate owners who drive themselves? Another pay cut for us all as in 1978, 1982, 1987 and 1998 so that he can have the plate that he deserves? I mean, we’ve got no more blood to give. Shift drivers are making half the minimum wage now.
I tell him he should come down to my fleet garage in Etobicoke and tell my operator and his drivers there about all the business that he says is out there. To which he did not reply or volunteer to come to the garage.
I ask him, if he and his fellows are all going to have plates for themselves, what should we do with all of the drivers who were on the Approved Drivers List in 1998 who were dishonourably “stiffed” by Howard Moscoe, Denzil Minnan-Wong and the City of Toronto?
“They should have plates, too,” he says, expansively.
And then he says something I have never heard the like of from any cab driver in all my 40 years in this business. He says, “And I don’t mind if they issue plates to the next 3,000 drivers after me!!!”
And, with that, I knew I had all of his number.
No sooner would this fellow get full control of a plate than he would sell it and vamoose the industry - and maybe the country.
A couple of hundred thousand Canadian dollars would go a long, long way in a Third World country.
So I tell Mr. Respect that most large cities in North America operate on a one cab to 900 population ratio, that one cab to 800 is said to be the danger point, and that Toronto is now down around one cab per 600 people (some say lower), and I ask if he thinks we should go to one cab per every 200 or 300 people in the city.
Then, before he answers, I ask him if he thinks we should go to one cab for every 50 people in Toronto? Or 50 cabs for every person in Toronto, so that he can have a plate, no matter the cost to anyone else? How many plates is too many, so that you can have a plate? I ask this very respectful fellow.
He has no answer for this. He looks at me in wordless horror, then gives up and slithers away.
••••••
Now I want to say, again, that I don’t like doing anything to step on any taxi driver’s impulse to make a better living for himself and his family. But, I’m sorry, I think it’s wrong for one faction to characterize themselves as the principal “victims,” when, in fact, they are nothing of the kind, and I think it’s wrong for them to further aggrandize themselves, as some did in 1998, at the cost of ruining the livelihoods of the great majority of the working drivers.
Two pieces in the April Taxi News - not counting my own - told it like it is. I’m referring, of course, to John Proos’s story under the heading “Requiem For Toronto’s Long-Forgotten Shift Drivers,” and Ed Fox’s very fine Letter-to-the-Editor that likened us all to “roaming packs of starving wolves, except that every member of the pack is at war with every other member ...”
So true, Ed.
I watched two drivers almost duke it out on the Jane-Bloor post a few days ago after one blatantly helped himself to a fare that he wasn’t entitled to.
Ah, isn’t it great what we’ve become?
And how much worse will it be allowed to get?
Peter McSherry is the author of Mean Streets: Confessions of a Nighttime Taxi Driver.