New York City taxi drivers commenced a hunger strike Wednesday, aiming to bring awareness to their plight and attempt to secure better debt relief terms from the de Blasio Administration.
Cabbies have been protesting outside City Hall every day for the past month and have taken other actions, such as blocking the Brooklyn Bridge, to demonstrate their distaste with de Blasio’s $65 million relief plan, which they say will keep many still in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.
“The city thinks it can ignore us, but they’re wrong. For thousands of drivers across New York, this is a matter of life and death,” said Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance union, in a Tuesday statement. “We will not sit back and let the city consign us to a lifetime of poverty and death in a debt trap.”
