Rene Cudal was the last to quit. The Friday after Labor Day 2005 was the day he’d marked in his calendar, but he procrastinated all morning and afternoon, dreading the moment his boss would put two and two together. Finally the boss went home. Cudal called him that evening and gave him two weeks’ notice.
In an act of bravado Carey apparently hadn’t noticed, in August, before any of them had quit their old jobs, the 4 Star couriers sent out a press release explaining that they were striking out on their own because they were “fed up with the exploitative nature of most courier companies in Chicago.” They announced the “first annual” 4 Star bike messenger prom, preceded by a pedaling parade that offered tattooed young women in prom dresses and held in a building where the super was a former messenger. Around 200 people showed up, the party netted $700, and because almost everyone there was a courier the collective interpreted it as a vote of confidence from the “community.” Korby, a 28-year-old with a BFA from the Art Institute, anonymously told the Tribune, “We want to bring a personal side to the messenger industry. We’ll be the owners. We’ll care.”
But soon enough Morell learned the ins and outs of the Loop grid. He learned how to transport boxes nearly his own size by balancing them on his handlebars. He learned how to ride a fixed-gear bike, the de rigueur rig for most messengers–no derailleurs, no freewheel, no brakes. He learned how to balance on his bike at stoplights–back a quarter crank, forward a quarter crank, the front wheel at an angle just so. At five-seven and 130 pounds, he rode lightly in the saddle, like a jockey. When he went back to school, he kept the job. In his piece for the Daily Northwestern he put it like this:
One afternoon about a year into the job, Morell took a corner too fast and tight. His bike slid out and he hit the ground chin first. He finished his run anyway, then pedaled to the emergency room, where he got eight stitches. He says his manager at Standard “strongly encouraged” him to use his Northwestern student insurance to protect the company’s worker’s comp premiums.
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A few months earlier Morell had done his first taxes as a bike messenger. Because he was classified as an independent contractor, no taxes were withheld from his pay and there was no employer to pay half his social security contribution. He owed about $4,000. “It cleaned me out,” he says.
“But if I’d been an employee,” he says, “I would have given them two weeks’ notice.”
At the meetings complaints about the workplace inevitably arose, and other couriers’ experiences made Morell’s troubles at Standard seem trivial. He heard reports of couriers saddled with thousands of dollars in medical bills–a man in a coma, a man with a fractured elbow, a woman with nerve damage after a truck ran over her arm. Though under state law and city statutes all messenger companies must provide workers’ comp whether or not they use independent contractors, disability payments for injured bikers were sometimes delayed and sometimes nonexistent. The Windy City BMA formed a grievance committee, and in the summer of 2003 it began looking for ways to organize a labor union. After flirting with the AFL-CIO, it became affiliated with the International Workers of the World, the Wobblies, already active with messengers in Portland, Oregon. A Chicago Couriers Union was formed, and the Windy City BMA faded away.
