Why the airport taxi drivers are right

The airport taxi drivers may be loud, disruptive and annoying, but here’s a thing: the taxis drivers are right.

Strip away the anger and rhetoric, the noise-making and traffic snarling, the bad PR for visitors and travellers, and the conclusion is inevitable: these cabbies are getting royally hosed.

Even Hanif Patni, the president of Coventry Connections Inc., does not dispute the basic narrative. Coventry and the airport authority negotiated a deal that only works if the drivers of 150 taxis eat the higher fees, possibly costing each of them as much as $1,000 more a month.

And, when the union responded with a resounding no in July — seriously, what else could they say? — they were locked out.

To add to the injury, Coventry then invites cabbies from another bargaining unit — remember, this is the same employer — to do the work of the locked-out ones. How could they not be furious? What kind of poisonous workplace is being manufactured? Here’s another way to look at it. The pot shared by Coventry and the airport is today roughly $621,000 a year. When the new fee structure is in place, there will be $2.4 million in the pot, give or take: $1.4 million for the airport and $1 million to Coventry. And where does the extra money come from, absent a meter increase? Out of the driver’s pockets: in effect, a pay cut.

So, why not just add an airport surcharge to cover the new $4.50 per-ride fee? Because the city regulates fares and has, flat-out, said forget about it. Did Coventry know all this before it signed a 10-year deal? Of course it did.

It neither helps that even basic concepts like “union” and “employer” mean different things in the taxi industry. A driver is not paid a salary by Coventry, thus is not a typical employee. No fares, no wages: in fact, the driver has to pay his “employer” to even go to work.

They are classed as dependent contractors and, we’re reliably told, file their income taxes as “self-employed” workers. This helps explain why, in an Uberclouded climate, drivers are so ready to be replacement cabbies: the pie is shrinking before their very eyes.

There’s no quarrelling with the right of the airport authority to seek more revenue from its taxi stand. It delivers a steady, growing and captive stream of customers, to the profit of outside companies. So, sure, it needs a cut of the action. And, every month, there are some 40,000 cab rides from the airport, so there are millions at play here.

Harry Ghadban was a cab driver at the airport once and is now the eastern Ontario director for Unifor, the taxi union. Much is made about how lucrative this taxi stand is, but he points out a couple of things. On a slow day, there might be five fares, with waits of an hour or two in between.

And if the customer is going to an airport hotel, well, too bad so sad: that hoped-for $50 fare is now eight bucks. Now back in line, bud, for the next flight.

Ghadban said the union offered to increase the $345 a month drivers were paying by more than 15 per cent. But that went nowhere. Patni, meanwhile, said Coventry was alive to the idea that it could not just dump a big increase in the drivers’ laps.

“The first thing we negotiated (with the airport) was that we were not going to go to these union and, overnight, just present a stupid increase for them, because it’s not appropriate.”

So, after the July 2014 contract start, there was a year to settle the matter. Patni said the two sides met five times. “The consistent response we got back was confounding to us.”

He says Coventry “never got any credible offer back.”

The negotiating message to airport drivers, he summarized this way: “You guys have to recognize that other drivers are willing to pay this. You have to recognize that all other airports collect this.”

He did receive a call from the union this week to restart the talks and says Coventry is open anytime to looking at a reasonable counter-offer.

“I want them to come back,” he said, making it clear how he views this dispute.

“A small group of 150 cars had a lock on the best jobs coming in and were not able to service the demands and were not willing to pay a fair amount to the employer.”

Fine, but to the point: the “fair amount” is a thing you negotiate, not dictate, hoping the union, out of desperation, will eat itself alive.