Western Cab Company Las Vegas NV

 Has Been Very Good To Me

republished by Vegas Taxi Driver
November 19, 2009

The below blog article was written while I was still working as a cab driver. A few weeks after writing this article in February 2009, I quit driving a cab and working at Western Cab Company. Since then, the economy in Las Vegas has actually gone down from where it was, and some of the other Las Vegas cab companies have fired many of their long time cab drivers who were not willing to degrade themselves to become lying stealing crooks. Three months after quit working for Western Cab Company, I went to work at a different Las Vegas cab company that hired part time drivers, was closer to my home, and was supposed to have a good reputation of treating drivers decent. That is what I told Western Cab I was going to do, but I did not last there more than two weeks with that fine establishment, because they had a new manager who was a disrespectful jerk and a snot, and I am just not that desperate. Besides that, the cars they had me drive were unsafe and very poorly maintained. And they wanted me to break laws. So, my opinion of Western Cab Company as a good employer, and a rose among thorns, is even higher than it was when I wrote this article.

Western Cab Company Las Vegas NV Has Been Very Good To Me

Western Cab Company has been very good to me. I have been employed as a taxi driver for Western Cab Company for over three years. I like Western Cab Company and the people I work for and the people I work with, so I decided to say why I like working for Western Cab Company.

I am just an employee at Western Cab Company, and I am in no way trying to represent or speak for Western Cab Company. The opinions and statements and facts on nevadataxidriver.com are not necessarily the views of Western Cab Company, and Western Cab Company has not endorsed anything on my website or blog or asked me to say anything to anyone, and nevadataxidriver.com is an independent entity owned by the sole owner of the nevadataxidriver.com domain name, and is independent of any agencies or organizations or companies.

The taxi business in Las Vegas is totally regulated by the Nevada Taxicab Authority, and has its own unique situation which is different from most cities. All of the cab drivers in Las Vegas are straight commission employees, and they do not lease their cabs and they are told what hours to work and what days to work (drivers at union companies bid on shifts and days and cabs based on seniority). Because the cab companies make all of their money from the meters, instead of receiving lease money and dispatch fees from drivers, a unique relationship exists between the cab companies in Las Vegas and the cabbies, and the cab companies need to monitor the amount of money being booked by drivers to make sure they are putting in an honest day of work and that drivers are not ripping off the company or . Las Vegas cabbies receive medical insurance after being employed for a year (six months at some companies), but they have to work 55 to 60 hours per week to qualify (some drivers work only four 12 hour shifts if they have been with a company for many years). I have never been opposed to working a lot of hours as long the income is worth it and I can save a lot of money.

Western Cab Company is not a union company. For a person who wants to be a career cabbie, working for a union cab company in Las Vegas may be the way to go, as long as a person wants to stay with the same company for many years. I have worked for union and non-union taxi companies in Las Vegas, but since I never intended to work for a long time as a cabbie, the union cab companies are not good for me. If you are in a union and are a cabbie in Las Vegas, and if you quit your job or want to switch companies, you lose all seniority and you start on the bottom. That is the biggest problem with the union system as it pertains to cab companies in Las Vegas. The cab companies in Las Vegas with unions realize that their drivers need to stay at their company or they lose their seniority and have to start over working the worst shifts and days and driving the oldest vehicles. As a new driver, the supervisors at the union cab companies that I encountered acted as if they needed to play games with me to let me know who is boss. I don't do games well.

Before I went to work at Western Cab Company I had been a taxi driver for four out of the nine parent companies that own taxi companies in the Las Vegas area. I have never been fired from a company in Las Vegas. I just never intended to stay working as a cabbie for more than a year at a time. I have been divorced for over twenty years and I like to be able to move around. (All my ex's live in Denver.) I have moved in and out of Las Vegas several times in the past 17 years. The first time I was a cab driver in Las Vegas was in 1994. I have spent just as much time working in restaurants in Las Vegas as I have driving for Las Vegas taxi companies. Driving a taxi was just a way to work a lot of hours for awhile and save up some money and be able to take time off to travel or move on to something else.

I have been employed for over 50 companies of various kinds in five states over the past 32 years, and six of them were cab companies in Las Vegas and Oregon. I have also owned several businesses, including a janitorial service, a t-shirt business, a limousine service, a restaurant management and consulting business, a commercial salmon troller, a night club, and an Internet marketing company. Most of my life I was managing businesses for other people or myself. I just want to get back to being self-employed, and cab driving is a stepping stone to get there.

In 2003, I owned a few businesses in Oregon. One of them was a bar. On February 1, 2004, there was a gang-related shooting in the parking lot of my business. Three customers were shot and one of my employees was almost killed. There were also a dozen gang-related shootings within a few miles of my club during the same week. This was the second time there had been a gang-related shooting at my club in three months, and one customer was shot the first time. There were no suspects in either incident. I was strapped for cash because my bar had only been open for seven months, and I did not have deep enough pockets to pay for the added security and surveillance that I believed I would to have in order to keep my customers and employees and myself safe, so I shut down the business. As a result, I ended up owing a lot of money. 

I was totally broke and in debt, so I moved back to Las Vegas in Febraury 2004, and got hired at a good restaurant in the Monte Carlo Resort. They treated me well, but I thought that I could make more money driving a taxi in Las Vegas, especially since I was willing to work every day and didn't mind long hours. Most restaurants do not allow employees to work more than 40 hours in a week, and they have to cut hours for employees during slow times. I wanted to work lots of hours and make enough money to save up money so I could work at making money online with Internet marketing. So I gave the restaurant a 30 day notice, and went to work at a cab company other than Western cab Company. I worked almost every night, 13 1/2 hours a night, and worked as hard as I could. I worked 45 days in a row at one time. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not get ahead at that company, because I was not willing to long-haul passengers.

So I quit that company, and went to work at a unionized taxi company which had great benefits and was a good company, but I didn't have the patience to put up with the jerk who was my supervisor and was on a power trip and likes playing games with drivers.

By the time I applied to work at Western Cab Company, my expectation for going to work for a Las Vegas cab company was very low. All I was hoping for was a place to work and survive for a year and make some money without too much harassment. I did not intend to work there for more than a year. Before going to Western Cab Company, I called one of the cab drivers I had worked with at another cab company, and asked him how he liked Western Cab Company. He had driven for other cab companies in Las Vegas for many years, and he had nothing but good things to say about Western Cab Company. I thought that was interesting, because I met him while I was working at a cab company where the manager used to threaten drivers that if they lost their job that they would end up working at Western Cab Company, as if that was a bad thing. The company we had worked for before Western Cab Company was a terrible company to work for, and we should have just gone to work at Western Cab Company right away instead of putting up with their crap for one day. He is still working for Western Cab Company and says he loves it.

When I walked on to the cab yard to apply for a job, I knew nothing about Western Cab Company, except for things I had heard from cab drivers and cab companies. I was interviewed and hired by the founder of the company, Herb Tobman. I was impressed with him from the moment I met him. He was down to earth and treated all of his employees with respect. He was strict, but respectful. Unfortunately, he passed away several months after I started working for Western. But during the few months that I knew him, he was almost always there when I came to work and he would ask me how I was doing, even though I was a new employee. Every employee at the company liked Mr. Tobman.

From the time I started working at Western Cab Company, I realized that the way Western Cab Company is run is different from other cab companies I have worked for in Las Vegas. Drivers are treated like grown ups. There are minimal restrictions and rules, and drivers are expected to be responsible on their own, without somebody telling them what to do all the time. The drivers are not required to stand in line and wait to get a trip sheet from a supervisor or talk to a supervisor to get a cab assigned to them. There is a grease board with the numbers of cabs, and drivers' names are next to the numbers. Drivers come to work, find their name on the grease board, check their name off with a grease pen, grab a blank trip sheet, find their cab, and go to work. Drivers at Western Cab Company are not required to shave, which is a big plus for me. (My face does not like razors.) There are no road supervisors running around harassing drivers. If you do what you are supposed to, everything will be fine.

After three to six months of working at Western Cab Company, drivers are usually assigned a cab that is their regular cab. Driving the same cab all the time is low stress because drivers get to know everything about their cab, and they know they are going to be assigned that car for a long time, and so they take care of it. If they don't, they are just hurting themselves. If drivers work extra days, they can request to work their regular cab on those days. Sometimes drivers are allowed to take days off if there are extra drivers available.

The first cab I was assigned to already had about 120,000 miles on it, and had not been cared for by the driver who had been driving it before, who got fired. It took me a couple of months to figure out everything that was wrong with it, and I kept taking it into the shop until things worked, and then it was a good cab. Less than two years from the time I started working at Western Cab Company, I was assigned to a new cab, and I have been driving that cab since then, and it is still in great shape, because the day driver and I have taken very good care of it.

The thing that I like the most about Western Cab Company is that I have not been harassed or punished or restricted or suspended or penalized for booking too low, even though many times I have booked much lower than the average. They have allowed me to work my regular shift and drive a new car and not be restricted, even though my book has been way lower than the average at times, because I refuse to long haul customers to book more. I know that some Las Vegas cab companies would have harassed and penalized me, and maybe even fired me, for booking too low.

Prior to working for Western Cab Company, my opinion of taxicab companies in Las Vegas was not good at all, and my experiences working for cab companies in Las Vegas were not good ones. During the first year I worked there, I did not talk to other drivers at Western Cab Company, and I just went to work and did the best job I could, and tried to stay under the radar. Since I started working for Western Cab Company, I have always told people that Western Cab Company was the best cab company to work for in Las Vegas, but I still had a bad opinion of all cab companies in Las Vegas. I assumed that Western Cab Company was probably as bad as other companies, just run by nicer people. I used to look at the system in Las Vegas of not allowing competition and not allowing cabbies to own their own cabs as just about greed and power. I still think that it creates a situation where some Las Vegas cab companies are allowed to abuse and mistreat employees. But now I believe that if all the cab companies in Las Vegas were as conscientious as Western Cab Company, and if they genuinely cared about their employees like Western Cab Company, and if the Nevada Taxicab Board did their job properly, the position of being a Las Vegas taxi driver would be getting better instead of getting worse. Now I can safely say that the people who own and run Western Cab Company have gone out of their way to be fair and decent to their drivers, even though some drivers do not deserve it.

During the past two years, I came to realize that Western Cab Company was not just an okay company, but that the owners and managers are exceptional people and are very good to work for. I know that they would be happy if I would book more, and I would like to make more money, but I have not been harassed or punished or restricted or suspended or penalized for booking too low, even though I have booked much lower than the average, because I do not long haul. Western Cab Company takes into consideration that I work hard and am conscientious and safe and follow the rules outlined by the Nevada Taxicab Authority. They have allowed me to work my regular shift and days and drive a new car and not be restricted, even though my book has been lower than the average, because I am not long-hauling and ripping off customers. Some Las Vegas cab companies would have harassed and penalized me, and maybe even fired me, for booking too low. Instead, Western Cab Company has treated me much better than I ever expected.

About a year after I started working at Western Cab Company I got to know one of the drivers who had worked for Western Cab Company for over five years. He used to be my neighbor and we lived in the same building. He was always late for work and did not book much and he slacked off a lot. He also had a lot of health problems. They continually tried to get him to improve, but finally they had to let him go. I still talk to him from time to time, and he is working at a different cab company, but even when he was fired from Western Cab Company he never said a bad word about Western Cab Company, and he wished that he was working for them now. There are many drivers at Western Cab Company like me who have been burned by other cab companies in Las Vegas, and if you talk to them you will find that they like working at Western Cab Company.

I was expecting to be working at something besides cab driving by now. After one year had gone by of working at Western Cab Company, I decided that it was an okay place to work for a little longer, I liked the people that worked there, and it was close and convenient for me. After working there for less than two years I was ready to give them my 30 day notice to go back to working at restaurants, so I could have less hours and spend more time working on Internet marketing. However, two days before I was going to give them my notice, I was assigned to drive a brand new cab. They must have had intuition or something, but I decided to not quit at that time. I figured I might as well stay and drive the new cab for a while before quitting. 

After two years of working at Western Cab Company I had the opportunity to work for a brand new restaurant in the Palazzo which is owned by the same people I had worked for at the Monte Carlo, but since I was driving a new cab and Western Cab Company kept treating me well, I decided to stay there a little longer.

During the spring of 2008, I was making better money at any time that I worked at Western Cab Company, and I was finally getting ahead and saving money so I could move on to something else. I didn't even hate my job. But then, on May 29, 2008, I had a stroke while I was working. The only thing that it affected was my ability to speak and write, but I was out of work for almost six weeks. It has been difficult for me to learn how to talk again. I have aphasia as a result of my stroke. I am functional at speaking and writing, and most people who do not know me cannot tell I have speech problems, but it bothers me immensely that I cannot speak as well as I used to. It takes me much longer to write things, and I have to go back and find places where I omitted words.

I am just glad that I have a job with health insurance. Now I need to have a job with health insurance, even though the pay has been poor recently because of bad economic times. I have been able to work less than my scheduled 55 hours every week, because there are lots of extra drivers available right now, and I am trying to not push myself because of my health problems, because I do not want to have another stroke. Even though this would be a good time to start long-hauling people and stealing rides from other cabbies, I am above that. I have passed up many opportunities in my life where I could have made ten times as much money as being a cab driver if I was willing to be unethical. In the future, I will look back on this time and feel good about myself that I was not a crook, and that I ended up working for a good company that does not pressure me to be a crook. Because I work for Western Cab Company, I do not have to be a crook. Western Cab Company has been very good to me. I appreciate Western Cab Company.

I am just an employee at Western Cab Company, and I am in no way trying to represent or speak for Western Cab Company. The opinions and statements and facts on nevadataxidriver.com are not necessarily the views of Western Cab Company, and Western Cab Company has not endorsed anything on my website or blog or asked me to say anything to anyone, and nevadataxidriver.com is an independent entity owned by the sole owner of the nevadataxidriver.com domain name, and is independent of any agencies or organizations or companies.

by Vegas Taxi Driver
March 13, 2009

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