New law helps injured cab drivers, livery bases
-
- July
- 25
  Gov. David Paterson signed a bill today to help livery cab drivers in New York City, Westchester and Nassau County. It establishes clear rules to determine when the drivers are considered employees or independent contractors of livery bases—cab companies that dispatch drivers across New York City. The current system blurs the line between the two, which has jeopardized compensation for workers who get injured, prompted lawsuits and affected pay for other non-driver employees taxi companies, the governor said.  The legislation also creates a fund to give independent contractors in the taxi business and their families workers’ compensation benefits in cases of severe injury or death. It will kick in when no-fault automobile insurance does not provide any or sufficient coverage. The law will cover more than 40,000 livery drivers.
  The new law “will reform a system that has been bogged down by bureaucracy for too long …†Paterson said in a statement.
  “Unfortunately, for years these drivers had no coverage whatsoever, and many have suffered hardships due to injury, assaults, robberies and even murder on the job,†said Fernando Mateo, founder and spokesman for the state Association of Tax Drivers.
  Until now, there has been no system in place to make clear when livery cab bases should classify drivers as employees or independent contractors. The result could be years without compensation for seriously injured drivers who cases bounce between the no-fault insurance and workers’ compensation systems.
This entry was posted
on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 7:38 pm by Cara Matthews.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Print This Post
| 
Email This Post
Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
