Bike messengers answer union's call.

New York City 

In the elevator heading up to Teamsters Local 840 for an organizing meeting of New York City bike messengers, there are three sweaty messengers, one bike (propped upright on its back wheel), and me. These are three of the brave people who career around the streets of Manhattan on two wheels, hustling packages back and forth. They have had a long day, and it shows.

"Hey man, how you doing?" one sinewy courier asks the guy with the bike.

"Oh, bad day. Oil on Third Avenue." He lifts up his pant leg to show some nasty bruises and scrapes on his shin.

"Oh, yeah, that's a killer," says biker number one, giving me a nod. He has just finished explaining to me that every bike messenger suffers at least one accident a year. A week ago, a biker was killed after colliding with a double-parked truck, then a van. It was the third bike-messenger death so far this year.

Some New Yorkers have it in for bike messengers because of the way they speed

around city streets that are already an anarchic battleground of pedestrians, cabs, private cars, buses, bikers and Rollerbladers. One Republican member of the city council even tried to codify the anti-bike-messenger sentiment with a measure proposing that police seize the bicycles of messengers suspected of hazardous behavior. The new union is fighting this proposal.

Bike messengers are in a hurry for a reason. They're almost always paid on a piece-rate basis. So long as they earn as little as $2.50 per package, they have to hustle just to get the rent paid.

These are some of the issues that 100 or so bike messengers have come to Local 840 to discuss this evening. The messengers, almost all young African-American men, are sitting on folding chairs in a thin, blue haze of cigarette smoke. They have a lot of questions about the union organizing drive, but they seem happy to be here.

Local 840 has been working to organize the bike messengers since the spring. (Teamsters have also launched a bike-messenger organizing drive in Washington, D.C.) So far, the union has made inroads at four of the city's two-dozen messenger companies. The bikers have called job actions at one employer, and the results of a union election are pending at another. The pro-union messengers are slowly building up contacts, sometimes by sliding leaflets to fellow messengers at stoplights.

Some of the employers are not pleased. "We think unions are bad for the employees," says Robert Wyatt, a co-owner of the Orbit/Lightspeed company, whose messengers are attempting to organize. "We think that what the union is going to do is protect the lazy worker at the expense of the good worker."

But it's easy to see why bike messengers are interested in a union. Not only is their pay quite low (averaging $300 to $400 a week), but they generally receive no health benefits, sick pay, or vacation days. According to the union, some of the messenger companies don't even pay workers' compensation for these frequently injured employees.

Bike messenger Alexander Williams says job security is also a big issue. "If a messenger decides he doesn't want to go to work one day because it's sleeting or something, he can just be fired," he says. Williams says he himself was fired for taking three days off when his wife gave birth, after working for the company for five years. "They even tried to keep me from filing for unemployment," he says.

All this grief on top of the regular daily grind (Williams work an average 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. workday) makes being a bike messenger an extremely tough job. But, as one messenger at the meeting points out, it's one of the few employment options out there for young black men.

The concept of unions is obviously a new one to many of the bike messengers in this room. One courier raises his hand to say that he is here because someone handed him a leaflet about the organizing drive. He went back to the office and made fifty copies of the flier and handed it out to his co-workers. "Guys kept asking me to meet them in the bathroom to talk about it," he says. "They were afraid to come to this meeting. But we're going to have a meeting in the bathroom tomorrow and move ahead on this thing."