Bhairavi Desai is the founding member of the Taxi Worker's Alliance in New York . She works long hours, sometimes without pay, to improve the conditions of taxi drivers. In May 1998, the 27-year-old labour activist confronted the city's mayor, organizing one of the biggest 24-hour taxi strikes in New York history to protest city policing of the industry. A history and women's studies graduate from Rutgers, Desai took up the fight of the cab drivers, some 60 percent of whom, like her, are immigrants from South Asia, many of whom working up to 80 hours a week for as meagre as $18,000 a year without health benefits, or guarantee of being paid.