Workplace Violence and Stress: The Case of Taxi Drivers

Abstract

Abstract As important as the taxi cab industry is to urban transportation systems, the homicide rate among U.S. occupations, measured per hundred thousand workers, is the highest for taxi drivers. Taxi drivers face the likelihood of workplace homicide at four times the rate for police and other law enforcement jobs, which are generally perceived as having high workplace risk. The high rate of workplace violence and stress may reflect asymmetric market conditions. These conditions may reflect power that is the systematic exploitation of the weak (referred to by the roving bandit metaphor in the public choice literature), the presence of asymmetric information between the driver and the passenger, and differing social norms. As such, these asymmetric market conditions offer alternative explanations for the high incidence of violent crimes and stress from possible threats, assaults, and robbery present for taxi drivers. This study reports findings from a survey of 401 taxi drivers in Las Vegas, Nevada, a city for which local transportation services are a relatively large contributor to the local economy, which is heavily dependent on tourism. We describe the patterns of drivers' experiences with occupational violence in terms of abuse, physical assault, robbery, fare evasion, and false allegations. Findings show marked differences between logit equations for native-born and foreign-born drivers (supporting the presence of asymmetry in social norms), statistical significance for a number of information symmetry measures for nativeborn drivers (reflecting correlation with the occurrence of violence), and limited significance for asymmetric measures of power.