It’s highway robbery!
City hacks now have to shell out 6 cents per fare so they can pay for tutorials on ObamaCare, The Post has learned.
“Nobody’s happy about it,” said Charbel Sfeir, a yellow-cab driver since 1984. “It’s not fair. The money’s going to go to paperwork for ObamaCare. I don’t need to pay them do to paperwork.”
The hack tax, mandated by the city Taxi and Limousine Commission, went into effect Oct. 1 and requires that drivers pay for “disability insurance and health-care navigation services.”
The TLC has placed the Taxi Workers Alliance, a drivers union, in charge of administering the fund, and a final contract is being hammered out.
“This is a good thing,” said Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the TWA. “This is going to give services to a population that’s been exploited.”
When cabbies first heard about the surcharge, they understood it to mean that it was going to pay for actual health insurance.
But drivers now say they’ve been taken for a ride.
“I thought the 6 cents would go to health care,” cabby Placida Robinson said.
And it’s hardly chump change.
David Pollack, executive director of the Committee for Taxi Safety, estimates it will cost cabbies $10 million to $15 million annually and calls it a “scam.”
“This is totally out of the TLC’s jurisdiction,” he said. “It’s not in the City Charter, and it’s illegal.”
And the new tax is redundant. It’ll pay for disability insurance, a service yellow-cab drivers already pay through workers’ compensation, hacks said.
Pollack contended the disability insurance is itself redundant, because drivers are already covered through workers’ comp that they’re required to pay for.
Desai shot back, saying: “Workers’ comp is for on-the-job injuries. There are drivers who have to get kidney dialysis. They can’t get workers’ comp.”
But only $30 per driver will go into the disability fund, noted Pollack, who said the TLC awarded the TWA the contract only in return for its complicity with city policy on issues like the Taxi of Tomorrow, a plan that a court rejected last week.
