Bhairavi Desai
Most New Yorkers probably don't know Desai, but they know her handiwork. In May 1998, the 27-year-old labor activist went head-to-head with the city's combative mayor, organizing one of the biggest 24-hour taxi strikes in New York history to protest city policing of the industry. A history and women's studies graduate from Rutgers, Desai burned with a passion to take up the fight of the cab drivers, some 60 percent of whom, like her, are immigrants from South Asia, many of them working up to 80 hours a week for as little as $18,000 a year without health benefits, or even any certainty that they will be paid.

Desai's family had emigrated from Gujarat to Harrison, N.J., when she was six years old. Her father, who had been a lawyer in India, had trouble finding work and resorted to running a grocery store, and some of Desai's earliest memories were of racist attacks by skinheads. "I remember being chased down the street," she says. "I remember the hostility, and that politicized me." After graduating from Rutgers, she joined New York's Taxi Workers Alliance, where she is now staff coordinator. "I wanted to organize around issues of labor and class," says Desai. "I wanted to organize the immigrants, and it was important for me to go beyond what the AFL-CIO was doing. It was important to focus on life issues and not just the labor."

Desai bridged the ethnic, religious and regional differences among South Asian cab drivers by emphasizing that everyone is subject to the same difficulties. "We speak more than 100 languages," she says, "and yet there is a common language of exploitation that we all know. Because of our common goals, we were able to organize a common front." Now she plans to organize a South Asian Labor Alliance linking workers in the U.S. with those on the subcontinent. "Because our countries are underdeveloped, people are forced to migrate to countries that are often very hostile to them," says Desai. "It is important for us to have solidarity with workers in the Third World. They are not the ones who are stealing the jobs."

PHOTO: BEBETO MATTHEWS/AP