Make 2024 Our Strongest Year Yet!

Read Our Donor Appeal Letter

December 13, 2023

Dear Friends,

I hope this letter finds you well, in good health and courage during these times of war and struggle. It's been 25 years since I've written an appeal for donor support for NYTWA and the truth is, I write today with a conflicted mind. I hope if you are able, you will give toward the rebuilding of Gaza and to the peace with justice movement. And if you have something to spare, I humbly ask if you would consider a donation to NYTWA.  

Our beloved union, our labor of love and solidarity, will turn 26 in 2024, and with your support, we aim to make it our strongest year yet.  Our general membership now stands at 28,000.  Our dues-paying membership stands at over 6,000. And we enter the year on the heels of one of our largest and most significant victories as the state Attorney General announced $328 million in wage theft recovery from Uber and Lyft. It’s the largest wage theft recovery in NYS history and it is the result of a complaint filed by our union with the AG in 2015. Our attorneys also filed three federal lawsuits to keep the issue alive, and thousands of drivers participated in the campaign, organizing their friends through our wage theft clinic and petition to the attorney general. In 2017, twelve days after one of our filings in court, Uber announced it “made a mistake” and paid out $96 million to drivers to pay back a smaller amount. But the full amount stolen from drivers was still due. For 8.5 years our union persisted, and found ways to win. 

Beginning in 2024, every dollar of the $328 million recovery will be distributed to the drivers. We are also poised next year to complete our #EndCabbieDebt campaign. After a 45-day 24/7 camp out outside City Hall, including 15 days on a hunger strike, we had won the first of its kind city-backed guarantee in 2021 as an incentive for banks to lower the debt on taxi medallion loans and as a means to take the personal-guarantees off the backs of drivers. Up to now, 2,300 medallion loans have been restructured and $435 million in debt has been forgiven. That’s money which once went to banks and will now be in the hands of the drivers whose labor produced it. Our 2023 started with a strike against Uber for blocking a raise to keep Uber and Lyft drivers whole from historic inflation. They sued, we struck and in the end, the triumph was ours. Over $1 billion was redistributed to the drivers through the year’s campaigns. To the best of our abilities, we have organized without compromise and without fear and along that path of principle, we have delivered material change. 

NYTWA is rooted in the fighting spirit of the working class that yearns for a world with justice, rights, respect and dignity. We fight the billionaire class that exploits and the political class that serves their interests. And we strive to build an organization grounded in class conscious and democratic unionism and movement-building. When Uber bedazzled some in the labor movement, we saw through it. We have spent years in the cross-hairs of unions who sought sweetheart deals with big paydays to sell out drivers - an almost universal immigrant of color workforce they suddenly found of interest when drivers became the front line of the gig economy. We have stayed the course of uncompromising campaigns and we have organized a unity platform across the sub-sectors of drivers to build maximum labor power. In our defeat would be the victory for an unsparing capital and ruthless business model and so our union must triumph. No matter the odds and obstacles, our labor of love and solidarity must always find a way forward.

Today, we ask you, our friends and allies in the struggle for a more just world, for support so that we may have the resources needed to keep moving forward toward triumph and working-class power.

We are poised for an incredible growth as 90,000 drivers benefit directly from our wage theft campaign, as we cross the line of half a billion dollars in forgiven debt, and as we embark on a campaign for job security and retirement for drivers across the industry.  Most critically, we need resources for a rapid scale-up to field phone calls and walk-ins as 90,000 drivers and surviving family members of deceased drivers claim the funds owed to them. During COVID, we directly assisted over 5,000 drivers and outreached to tens of thousands to apply for state and federal aid to the total of over $1 billion. After our legal victory (co-counseled with Brooklyn Legal Services), including a federal preliminary injunction, 68,000 Uber and Lyft drivers also received unemployment at the employee rate during the pandemic, a life-changing difference of $1,200 more per month compared to the independent contractor rate the drivers would have received under the companies’ misclassification. This year, we signed up close to 10,000 drivers for damages hearings in a federal class action suit over the unconstitutional lack of due process when drivers were suspended upon arrest. Once again, we can provide mass-scale education and direct service resulting from a hard-fought policy campaign win. With more resources, we can also bolster our organizing to avail of this enormous opportunity to double our dues-paying membership to 12,000 and unleash the endless possibilities of our collective power. We can radically strengthen the internal infrastructure of NYTWA so that the organization which houses driver power is iron-clad and able to do much more in our commitment to solidarity, class conscious unionism and internationalism.

To meet both the demands and the potential of this tremendous moment, we will need your support. Anything you give will be deeply appreciated, and used to its maximum.

I thank you for taking the time to read this appeal, and more so, for being a kindred spirit in the struggle for a world with peace that is just, justice that is everlasting, and a working-class that is liberated.  Driver power, union power!

In solidarity and with love,

Bhairavi