For International Workers’ Day, nearly a hundred immigrant home care workers marched outside the gates of City Hall to demand that City Council pass legislation to abolish 24-hour work shifts in the home care industry.
“If we can stop 24-hour work shifts, patients will get better care, and workers will finally be able to get sleep and spend time with their family,” said Cai Qiong Liu, a 68-year-old home care attendant from China.
Liu worked as a home care worker for 18 years before retiring last year. For the last eight years, she worked 24-hour shifts, on call, five days a week, making a little over $15 an hour. But she claims she was not paid for all the hours worked and is owed over $100,000 in unpaid wages. Despite the unpaid wages, what she regrets most is the toll it took on her personal life.
“It’s very difficult,” she said. “I lost time with my family. It really hurt us.”
The workers, who are organizing with the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association as part of their Ain’t I a Woman?! campaign, was one of many city-wide actions taking place to commemorate International Workers’ Day, including a rally at Union Square and a march planned at Foley Square. Nationally, workers took to the streets, with over 1,000 demonstrations and rallies scheduled in every state.
Colloquially known as May Day, the 136-year-old working-class tradition annually celebrates the sacrifices and gains of workers around the globe and remembers worker-led struggles like the fight for an 8-hour day.
This year, home care aides, delivery workers, the construction trades, and federal employees held marches and rallies across the city to demand the end of the Trump administration’s attack on workers.
“The workers really mobilized and united the city to see that 24-hour shifts are not just bad for the workers and the patients, but it’s a shameful stain on our whole city,” said Sarah Ahn, a labor organizer with the Flushing Workers Center and member of the Ain’t I A Woman campaign.
Also read: ‘When We Fight, We Win’: ConEd Workers Celebrate Union Victory on May Day
Although she walks with a cane and needs to sit down on a fold-out chair, retired home care worker Reina Caba, 69, was happy to show support for her comrades in struggle. An immigrant from the Dominican Republic, Caba worked as a home care aide for 38 years, seven of which were 24-hour shifts.
A single mother of three, she said that working as a homecare worker was the only way she could support herself, even though the job took an irreversible toll on her body.
“Because I’m strong, they always gave me the bedridden patients, and all the years of turning them hurt my back,” she said. “I had to keep working despite the pain because I had to take care of the children and pay the rent.”
Introduced by City Council member Christopher Marte, Intro 175 would outlaw 24-hour work shifts in New York City, splitting them into two distinct 12-hour shifts. It would also prevent home care agencies from scheduling home care workers to work over 50 hours per week.
“This is common-sense law,” said Marte. “Nobody should be working 24-hour shifts, especially days on end. This is the one bill that highlights whether you’re with working families or not.”
The workers allege that Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Adrienne Adams has refused to allow the bill to come to the floor for a vote and demand that she support the bill. Several mayoral candidates, such as Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, Comptroller Brad Lander, and State Senator Jessica Ramos, have already come out in support of the bill.
Responding to Documented’s question on why Speaker Adams does not support the bill, Rendy Desamours, senior strategist and deputy press secretary for the city council, stated that the Speaker believes the law could only be changed at the state level.
“The City Council does not control Medicaid or home healthcare regulations and cannot deliver the changes that these workers and advocates want to see, because the state maintains this authority,” he said in a statement. “Speaker Adams doesn’t want to see any workers face harmful, unjust working conditions and passed a Resolution calling on the State Legislature and Governor to increase the wages and improve the working conditions of home care workers. Efforts must be focused on changes at the state level to resolve these issues, and arguments to the contrary are either misinformed or misleading and irresponsible.”
New York’s home health care industry is a $13 billion business that depends on a workforce composed mostly of immigrant women. For many who work in the industry, a 24-hour shift without being paid for a whole shift has become commonplace.
New York state law requires that home care workers in the five boroughs, as well as Westchester and Long Island, be paid a minimum wage of $19.10 an hour. However, current law dictates that workers are to be paid for 13 hours of a 24-hour shift, so long as they are given at least five hours of uninterrupted sleep and three hours of meal breaks.
Despite these legal requirements, many homecare workers claim that they regularly work an entire 24-hour shift without uninterrupted sleep or meal breaks, but are only paid for 13 hours.
In 2019, after years of legal battles by home care workers to recover unpaid wages, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that if workers didn’t receive the required sleep and meal breaks, employers must pay the workers for each hour of a 24-hour shift they worked.
