Biju Mathew

Biju Mathew is an American Marxist activist-intellectual. He is co founder and executive committee member of New York Taxi Workers Alliance and founding secretary of the National Taxi Workers Alliance. His areas of work include immigrant labor organizing, left political education, and transnational solidarity campaigns. He is an associate professor of Information Systems and American studies at Rider University (New Jersey).

Immigrant/ Taxi Workers Organizing

In 1998, Biju Mathew was one of the cofounders of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) (along with Bhairavi Desai, Javaid Tariq, and several others) . NYTWA is currently one of the most successful new immigrant workers unions in the US with over 17,000 members in NYC.^[1] The union primarily organizes yellow medallion lease drivers and has fought several successful campaigns including fair hike-lease cap campaigns in 2004, 2006, and 2012.^[2] Its most notable success is the building of a health and wellness fund for NYC taxi drivers in 2013-2014.^[3] In 2012 the NYTWA and its sister organization, The Taxi Workers Alliance of Pennsylvania (TWAPA) became the founding affiliates of the National Taxi Workers Alliance (NTWA) of the AFL-CIO.^[4] The NTWA is the 57th chartered union of the AFL-CIO and the first new charter in over 50 years.^[5] The creation of NTWA is a historic event and it is the first national union of independent contractor-workers.^[6] Dr Mathew’s book Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in NYC (New Press 2005; Cornell University Press 2008) documents much of this experience of organizing immigrant taxi workers.^[7] He is currently a secretary for the national union (with Bhairavi Desai as president, Ronald Blount as VP, and Javaid Tariq as treasurer). In 2013, the Taxi Drivers Association of Austin (TDAA) became the third affiliate of the NTWA. NTWA continues to organize taxi drivers in several other cities in the US.^[8]

Left Political Education

Professor Matthew has had a long record of volunteer left education work. He is most recently the co founder and chair of the executive council of Lamakaan, an open cultural space in Hyderabad, India.^[9] He serves on the board of the Brecht Forum, NY.^[10] He is also the co founder of Youth Solidarity Summer, a South Asian youth education summer camp.^[11]

Transnational Solidarity Campaigns

Professor Matthew is currently the convener of the Coalition Against Genocide (CAG), a coalition of 40 organizations dedicated to fighting for minority rights in India, especially for justice for the victims of the Gujarat carnage of 2002 that had left over 2,000 Muslim minorities dead in the western state of Gujarat, India.^[12] Dr. Mathew helped found the CAG in 2005. In 2002, after the Gujarat carnage, Dr. Mathew and several others founded the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (CSFH), which tracked over USD $6,000,000 being funneled to the Hindu-supremecist movement in India (the Hindutva Movement).^[13] This work is documented in a report titled “The Foreign Exchange of Hate” published in late 2002.^[14] CSFH has also investigated and published a report, “Unmistakebly Sangh”on the hindu supremacist movement student organizations in the US. Dr. Mathew is also the co-author of “Joined at the Hip”, a report published by the CAG in 2013 on the new front organizations of the hindu supremacist movement in the US.^[15] Dr. Mathew is also the cofounder of the Mining Zone Peoples Solidarity Group (MZPSG) that works on solidarity campaigns to support peoples movements against indiscriminate mining and consequent displacement in India.^[16] MZPSG currently works on a solidarity campaign for the anti-Posco campaign in India.^[17] Its report, documents the inconsistencies in the claims of posco india, the government of India, and the government of Orissa, in justifying the USD $12 000 000 Posco-India project.^[18] Dr. Mathew also serves on the board of the Singh Foundation NY and is the co-host and producer of Global Movements/Urban Struggles on wbai99.5fm, a NYC based community radio station.^[19][20]

Publications

Articles

• Mathew, B., Kamat, S., and Mir, A. (2004). "Producing hi-tech: globalization, the state and migrant subjects". Globalization, Societies and Education. 2 (1).
• Mathew, B. and Kamat, S. (2003). "Political violence in a globalized world: The case of Hindu nationalism". Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order. 30 (3).
• Mathew, B. (2000). Byte-Sized Nationalism: Mapping the Hindu Right in the United States". Rethinking Marxism. 12(3): 108–128."

Books

• Mathew, B. (2005). Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City. New York, NY: New Press.

References