Fifteen home care workers camped outside New York's city hall last month, refusing food until the city council agreed to vote on legislation that would ban mandatory 24-hour work shifts. A month later, that promised vote has not happened. On Friday, the workers announced they are preparing to strike again.
The No More 24 Act would require home care agencies to split overnight assignments into two 12-hour shifts and cap weekly hours at 56. It would also penalize agencies that retaliate against workers who refuse the grueling 24-hour live-in arrangements. But the bill remains stalled, with only 16 co-sponsors on the 51-member city council, leaving it 10 votes short of passage.
"We are very confident that our movement is getting bigger and there will be more pressure to do the right thing," said Zishun Ning, an organizer with the Chinese Staff and Workers Association.
The core grievance is blunt: under current New York labor law, home care agencies pay workers for only 13 hours when they assign a 24-hour shift, classifying the remaining 11 hours as sleep and meal time, even though aides provide continuous patient care. Patients authorized for 24-hour care cannot be left unattended. They have advanced dementia, severe disabilities, or terminal conditions. Throughout the night, aides must turn bed-bound patients every two hours to prevent bedsores, assist with bathrooms, administer medications, and respond to disorientation.
"This is the only industry that allows people to work for 24 hours and only get 13 hours of pay," said Christopher Marte, the city council member who introduced the bill in 2022. "A lot of times it's 23 days in a row where people have to leave their homes and stay and sleep and eat where they work."
The home care sector is one of the fastest-growing in the American economy, driven by an aging population. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects it will add more than 70,000 jobs by 2033, among the highest for any occupation. In New York alone, the industry generates $13 billion in revenue. Yet that growth rests on a workforce that is predominantly immigrant women and women of color. Two-thirds of home health care workers in New York state are immigrants who depend on these jobs for both income and health insurance.
Lai Yee Chan, 71, entered home care after New York's garment industry collapsed following the September 11 attacks. By 2007, her agency had pushed her into mandatory 24-hour shifts. Working for the Chinese-American Planning Council, she discovered that falling below 130 hours a month meant her family of five would lose health insurance. Her husband abandoned his own employment to care for their three children while she lived at work.
In 2013, after working 24-hour shifts from 2007 onward, Chan received a check labeled "overtime" for $200 from the CPC's accounting office. The amount allegedly covered roughly 6,000 hours. "They thought that because we can't read English, they can fool us," she said.
Chan walked into the offices of the Chinese Staff and Workers Association and began organizing. The Ain't I a Woman?! coalition, a group of home care aides, youth organizations, and feminist groups, has been fighting this system since 2015 through hunger strikes, lawsuits, and legislative pressure.
The coalition accuses the Chinese-American Planning Council of withholding $90 million in wages. The CPC did not respond to a request for comment. Every Wednesday morning for the past two years, coalition members, many in their 60s and 70s and some using walkers, gather outside a glass tower belonging to the agency. Their signs read "Stop killing us."
The No More 24 Act faces serious opposition from the Legal Aid Society and the Center for Independence of the Disabled New York, which argue that splitting 24-hour shifts into two 12-hour shifts would effectively double the number of workers needed per household, and that the supply does not exist to meet that demand.
After their hunger strike last month, workers secured a commitment from city council speaker Julie Menin to bring the updated bill to a vote in May. Menin's office later denied making an absolute guarantee on timing but acknowledged the bill had been substantially revised based on stakeholder feedback. A council spokesperson said, "We look forward to phasing out the 24-hour workday, an outdated practice that places workers under extreme physical and emotional strain."
Governor Kathy Hochul has reportedly been pressuring Menin to block the bill, threatening to withhold Medicaid funding to the city if it passes. Hochul's office declined to comment. Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned explicitly on ending 24-hour shifts and co-sponsored the bill as an assemblyman. Since taking office, workers say he has been absent from the fight. When home care workers staged a sit-in at city hall, his office sent a representative with a message that stung: the mayor needed to consider those who wanted to work 24-hour shifts.
Caixiong Liu, 69, spent 18 years in home care and joined the movement in 2022. She suffers from chronic back pain caused by lifting and turning patients, insomnia that has never resolved, and memory loss she attributes directly to years without uninterrupted sleep. "I don't want the next generation of workers to go through what I did," Liu said.
The workers say another strike is coming. The folding chairs will return. The signs will go back up. The fasting will resume.
Author James Rodriguez: "The math is impossible to ignore: a 24-hour workday for 13 hours' pay isn't labor practice, it's theft, and the fact that it takes hunger strikes to get city hall to even schedule a vote on stopping it speaks volumes about how little this city values the workers keeping its most vulnerable residents alive."
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