Who

New York's cabbie champion, Desai is the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a non-profit advocacy group to which a quarter of the city's 40,000 licensed cab drivers belong.

Backstory

Desai emigrated with her parents from Gujarat, India at the age of six and settled in Harrison, New Jersey. After graduating from Rutgers with a degree in women's studies, Desai joined Manavi, an organization dedicated to helping battered South Asian women, later taking a job with the like-minded Committee Against Asian American Violence. In 1998, she and several others set up the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which represented something of a continuation of her advocacy work on behalf of South Asians, considering some 60% of city cabbies hail from the subcontinent. Starting out with a modest 700 members, the NYTWA put itself on the political map a few months later when it organized a 24-hour work stoppage—the first cabbie strike in three decades—over a series of controversial regulations imposed by Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The organization's membership rolls expanded soon afterward and it now represents 10,000 cabbies, or 25% of the city's taxi drivers.

Of note

New York's cab drivers are employed by various privately-owned fleets and there is no citywide union that all hacks belong to, but the NYTWA is the largest and most powerful of the several different cabbie advocacy groups that operate in the city. In the past few years, Desai has faced off against fleet owners and TLC boss Matthew Daus over a series of issues, pushing hard for cab fare increases in 2004 (but also working to channel the money to cabbies rather than cab companies), and, more recently, protesting city plans to install credit card-swiping machines and GPS tracking systems in cabs. (Many cabbies consider the tracking systems an invasion of privacy and a burdensome expense.) In September 2007, the NYTWA organized a two-day strike that created mild disorder in the city; Desai followed up with less successful follow-up strike in October.

Personal

Desai hasn't strayed from her New Jersey roots. She lives in Jersey City with her parents.

No joke

In 2005, the South Asian community organization DesiClub named Desai the "Coolest Desi of the Year." She narrowly beat out Kal Penn (yes, the guy from Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) for the honor.

---