Click on the picture to see a larger version.
Off duty. Photo by Arthur Hewitt.

This driver must have been photographed just before he started his shift. He certainly doesn't look like he's come off fourteen hours of cab driving.

Source:
Outing magazine, vol. XLIX no. 2, November, 1906, p. 135.

Vance Thompson's Cab Drivers / 36

The New York Cab Driver and his Cab / 8

There are forty-five stables sending out cabs and victorias into the streets. In their employ are about one thousand four hundred drivers, who are members of the Coach and Cab Drivers' Protective Association, which is known in the trade as the "Liberty Dawn." They are part of the Team-Drivers' International Union, of the one hundred thousand drivers scattered from Maine to Hawaii. Edward Gould is chairman of "Local No. 607." He is a big, upstanding man with a good, wind-beaten face. In the bulk of him a fine sense of humor lurks.

"The object of our society," said he, "is to help out the landlords."

"That sounds good," said I; "go on."

"Well, it is this way," Gould explained; "before the association took hold the men were working twenty hours a day and sleeping in the stables. We brought the work down to fourteen hours a day and gave the men a chance to hire flats and cultivate domesticity."

There is a universal wage of $2 a day; and then there are the tips. Each member is taxed a monthly due of five cents if he falls ill he receives $7 a week for two months; if he dies he is buried to the extent of $115. The "Liberty Dawn" is a notable institution. Its membership includes most of the drivers of the railway cabs. A man need not have gray in the hair – nor the shame of baldness on him – to remember the origin of this tolerable system of getting about. It dates back only a few years. The service is a good one. You pay the fare to the agent of the railway cab service before you get in; it is as plain a business as buying a ticket to Canaan, Four-Corners, or any other metropolis; and you pay an exact legal fare.