Bike messengers answer union's call.

• Author: McClure, Laura
• Position: New York, NY

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...