On December 9th, taxi drivers from across Toronto staged a series of protests against the rival company Uber. Protesters shut down four high traffic areas before finishing with a demonstration at City Hall, calling upon the mayor to ‘bring justice’ to drivers by stopping Uber from operating illegally. These disruptions reverberated throughout the city as thousands of commuter vehicles came to a resounding halt.

Uber is a company that uses online software to connect customers to drivers, often for much cheaper than what many licensced taxi competitors offer. Since Uber’s conception in Silicon Valley only a few years ago, it has spread to cities across the world—much to the dismay and protest of local taxi drivers. Both the Uber company and its software seem to represent where capitalism is headed right now. Many companies like Uber are moving toward a model in which they focus on the delivery of goods and services as efficiently as possible to middle class consumers using a combination of cutting edge technology and easily exploitable and disposable workers who are conveniently labelled independent contractors. The broader ‘Uberization’ of the economy is already underway, as the Uber platform is now being used from everything from package deliveries, to health care, to snow removal.

In Toronto during the December 9th strike, drivers pointed out that Uber drivers don’t pay licensing fees and undergo minimal training. As the Ontario Highway Traffic Act makes it illegal for any taxis to operate without special licensing, drivers questioned why city officials had yet to impose any restrictions on Uber operations. Mayor John Tory had indicated on several occasions that such plans were in the works, yet none had materialized.

In their protest, taxi drivers staged city hall demonstrations, road blocks, and a hunger strike. Frustrations were clearly running high: in one widely circulated video, a taxi driver was dragged down Queens Park Crescent by an Uber car; in another, a driver compared Uber to ISIS. Still, the sentiment of the protest is relatable.

Uber receives an unfair business advantage due to lack of regulation, and its introduction to Toronto has brought dramatic changes to the lives of already poorly paid taxi drivers—more than 80% of whom are working class immigrants. It is not uncommon for taxi drivers to have seen their incomes halved since the advent of Uber. “I’ve been a taxi driver for 25 years,” said one driver from Scarborough, “and this is the biggest change I’ve seen in my income over the shortest amount of time.”

Uber drivers have fared no better. Many were tempted by the flexibility of owning their own business and scheduling their own hours—something that the company advertises as a key selling point. Uber calls its drivers ‘business partners,’ only requiring them to have access to a car and a license, making it a highly accessible low-skilled job. As economic opportunities are scarce enough for those at the bottom, it’s not surprising to learn that many Uber drivers—especially those who drive for the lower-class ‘UberX’, and especially those who rely on Uber for most of their income—are working class immigrants who live in Toronto’s suburbs.

Since Uber cut its prices in 2014, many drivers now claim to work much longer hours and still struggle to make minimum wage from their fares. Even though drivers own their cars and pay for car insurance, gas, repairs, and so on, Uber still pockets 20% of their income as an access fee to the market of transporting people.

Uber drivers also depend on their customer satisfaction star-ratings, and rarely speak frankly about the conditions of their exploitation. For example, if they hold an average rating of less than 4.7 (out of 5) in many cities, they can be fired. Uber drivers have begun to organize in parts of the USA, demanding fairer working conditions and a living wage.

Parallels can easily be drawn between exploitation of both taxi drivers and Uber drivers by their respective employers. All drivers are faced with the burden of paying for the maintenance of their own vehicles. They also face daily, sometimes violent, racism. The companies that employ these drivers refuse to raise their wages, even as their livelihoods are threatened by economic insecurity. All are working longer hours and even taking on other jobs to make ends meet. Importantly, so many drivers are immigrants who came to Canada, the so-called land of economic opportunity, only to find themselves racialized and forced into cheap labour markets.

There is no doubt that the Uber corporation is worthy of contempt. Nevertheless, something missing from the recent taxi strike was a working class perspective. By directing complaint at the illegality of Uber, the protests missed the point that taxi drivers and many Uber drivers actually share a common struggle. It also shifts responsibility away from the exploitative taxi companies who continue to profit from their drivers’ labour.

Still, in the so-called Uberizing economy taxi and Uber drivers alike should take stock of the incredible power they sit on, as demonstrated by the traffic-blocking protests. In Toronto, a city where business demands the fast-moving uninterrupted flow of people and goods, taxis (and Ubers) are a vital part of the transportation infrastructure. Organizing a city-wide shutdown is undoubtedly a useful way to make one’s voice heard.

Featured image from The National Post

¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York was on display at The Bronx, El Museo del Barrio and Loisaida museums in New York this fall. The exhibit displayed the immense body of art, culture, and politics that the Young Lords produced over the years, a sort of shrine to the radical love that the movement was so committed to.

The Young Lords Party (YLP) was a group of mainly Puerto Rican socialist revolutionaries who organized in cities across America during the 1960s-80s. The party was influenced by groups such as the Black Panther Party. YLP gradually transformed itself from a small network of gang members into a broader human rights movement pushing neighbourhood empowerment and Puerto Rican self-determination as its core missions.

Lining the walls of the Bronx Museum in particular are dozens of copies of Palante, The Young Lord, and Pitirre, the three newspapers produced by the party. These newspapers recounted the stories and culture that gave life to the Young Lords movement, and it is for this reason that the newspapers are still admired and displayed in museums to this day.

The newspapers documented the atrocities committed against these racialized working class groups over the years—violent racism, poor housing conditions, police brutality, and even a CIA undercover program to flood Puerto Rican neighbourhoods with heroin.

Countless other historical examples can be drawn of newspapers acting as a central means of uniting people by documenting struggle—notably, the Black Panther Party paper, which outlined the famous 10-point program calling for ‘Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice, and Peace’ among other demands. Another is the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement newspaper, Inner City Voice, that was not only the voice of radical politics in working class black Detroit but also published articles on guerrilla movements in Latin America, women’s liberation, and anti-war movements during the 1960s. The titles of the headlines in this paper make it clear the ideological agenda it promoted: “Michigan Slavery”, “Cops on rampage- 14 year old shot”, or “Black worker uprising”, to name but a few. The newspaper here was used as not only as a tool for education and empowerment, but also to counter the hegemonic discourse of capitalist publications that were all but silent on the substantive issues of class, race, or gender.

The culture of revolution: Documenting and archiving the Young Lords struggle in New York circa 1970

While the newspaper can be a tool used for social change, if in the hands of the wrong people it can also be a tool used to control people. The bourgeois mass media—most large-scale television, radio, and newspapers that are run to make a profit—don’t tell the stories that reflect people’s struggles. Rather, they skew and distort stories to make them more palatable, pleasant, and less ‘threatening’ to the social order. This is because the mass media is controlled by people who have a vested interest in the status quo, and whose profit or dominance is threatened by the idea of large-scale social change–that is, they are capitalist enterprises.

Stories that are run by the bourgeois media claim to take a ‘neutral’ stance, but in truth they are pushing a very carefully constructed, de-politicized point of view. They could not, for example, publish an article pushing a specific anti-capitalist, anti-racist, or anti-colonial perspective.

Even the best left-wing journalist enterprises are most often bourgeois media, and because of this their stories are limited in scope and purpose. The Toronto Star is an excellent example of this. The Star can run an editorial on the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by the settler colony Israel but at the same time endorse Liberal leader Justin Trudeau for Prime Minister–a man who is a professed Zionist and apologist for Israeli apartheid.

Likewise, right-wing publications in Toronto appeal outright to populism with no attempt at critical commentary. The Toronto Sun, for example, has strong ties to capitalist think-tanks (the Fraser Institute, C.D. Howe Institute, or Conference Board of Canada to name a few) that are funded by corporations or political interests with deep pockets.

The community newspaper, then, has a duty to expose these faults in the mass media, to poke holes in its ideology at every opportunity, and to document instead the stories that reflect the experiences of the working class.

Archived front pages of Young Lords newspapers on display at the Bronx Museum, New York

It is newspapers like those produced by the Young Lords that recount the story of revolution and a creative imagination of another world that is possible. More than that, it reminds us of the need to document and archive struggle. In many ways this same documenting and archiving drives hip hop’s need to preserve the history and legacies of slavery and racism in America, and other artistic representations of suffering and loss. And, because the newspaper is mass-distributed, it is a useful tool for uniting many of us in a common struggle—to bring people together by documenting the livelihoods, stories, and collective memory of exploitation endured by working-class people.

Archives of Palante can be found online here.

Radio Basics interviewed the Young Lords founder José Cha Cha Jiménez, archived here.

CUPE 3902 Unit 1 represents more than 6000 teaching assistants, part-time lecturers, lab demonstrators, graders, and invigilators employed at the University of Toronto. In the early hours of February 27th, a tentative agreement between the employer and the union was reached, awaiting a ratification vote from its members. The vote, which took place last Friday afternoon, resulted in a resounding ‘no’.

Regarding this overwhelming vote to strike down the tentative agreement, one TA explained that “while the employer made concessions on a number of fronts, the main issue — the lack of a liveable wage — was hardly addressed.” The strike began immediately, with picket lines forming Monday morning.

Support for the union’s cause has been widely expressed, both on the picket line and in social media. Rachel MacKinnon, a first year PhD student, commented on this remarkable level of solidarity on the picket line near King’s College Circle. “I’ve actually seen other students with bigger funding packages who aren’t even teaching this term coming out for us, and that’s really awesome. So I want to be able to give that back to people.”

As outlined in a previous article, the guaranteed funding package for graduate students at the University of Toronto is $15,000, falling $8,000 below the Toronto poverty line. The central issue in the current strike is to bring the funding package, which has not been increased since 2000, closer to a ‘livable wage’. “None of the demands the union is making strike me as overreach,” said Eric Mathison, a PhD student in philosophy. “Graduate students and sessional instructors help this university operate. Requesting fair, stable employment is reasonable.”

Members also want to remind the public that while they see the strike as necessary, they would still much rather be in the classroom performing their regular duties. “We’re not doing this because we really want to be out here,” MacKinnon said. “We want this to be over as soon as possible.”

Picketers slow traffic as part of their demonstration.

There is still little indication as to how long the strike will last. In an email sent out to all students early this morning, the union stated that the University has not yet been in contact. The University did, however, send an email to all students last Friday, warning students of potentially ‘intimidating’ picket lines and to call campus police should they feel unsafe–a peculiar response, which the union called “scare tactics.”

Meanwhile, CUPE 3902 Unit 3, representing non-student academic staff such as sessional lecturers, voted Monday night on whether or not to ratify their tentative agreement. The result was a decision to send the vote to the entire unit across all three UofT campuses. According to one source, the agreement for Unit 3 faculty represents a strong step in ensuring more job security, but very little movement towards wage increases. Unit 3 may choose to reject the offer and strike in solidarity with Unit 1.

A similar labour strike looms further north at York University. CUPE 3903, representing contract faculty and teaching assistants, had also reached a tentative agreement with the employer. According to the union’s website, this agreement was voted down on Monday night, with a ‘no’ vote of nearly 70 per cent. 3903 also welcomes students and the public joining them on the picket lines.

A picket line near Queen’s Park.