NEW YORK—This March 8th, on International Women’s Day, homecare workers took to City Hall to pressure Gov. Kathy Hochul and the New York City Council to pass Int 0615-2024, also known as the “No More 24” bill, which would abolish the 24 hour workday, and force employers to repay approximately $90 million in stolen wages.
The proposal was introduced to council in 2024, though it has since sat in the Committee on Civil Service and Labor unaddressed until this past December. The language of the bill would limit the total hours an employer can assign to a worker for one shift to 12 hours while leaving room for exceptions and emergencies.
Homecare workers are often assigned to patients who need “around-the-clock care,” resulting in assigned 24-hour shifts without notice or consent from an aide. Workers are only compensated for 12 to 13 of these hours, the remaining 11 considered “time off” for sleep and meals. Mostly middle-aged or elderly themselves, these workers—mostly women—spend these consecutive hours doing back-breaking physical labor in a high-stress healthcare environment.
The struggle to end the 24-hour workday is led by the Ain’t I A Woman? Campaign (AIW), Youth Against Sweatshops (YAS), and the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops (NMASS). The movement they constitute, “No More 24!”, began its fight over ten years ago, with Lai Yee Chan and two other home attendants filing a class-action lawsuit in 2015 which alleged their employer, the Chinese American Planning Council, failed “to pay them under the New York Labor Law (1) minimum wages, (2) overtime wages, (3) spread-of-hours wages, (4) straight time wages, among other claims.”
The non-profit opposite the barricade
The Chinese American Planning Committee has been a non-governmental organization claiming to represent New York’s Chinese community since 1965. CPC cites the “social and economic progress of immigrant and low-income communities of New York” as part of their “guiding philosophy.”
In line with this mission, the CPC gives lip-service support for home-aide workers when talking to the press. Its most recent statement, a March 3 press release, attempted to dispel what it calls “mischaracterization” by the Ain’t I a Woman? Campaign. “We fully support home care workers in their call to end 24‑hour shifts and to establish universal 12‑hour split shifts,” CPC claimed. Still, regarding the bill which would end these 24-shifts, the CPC maintained that it has “taken no stance on this bill.”
Despite this posture of neutrality, homecare workers commonly understand the CPC as a key opponent in asserting their rights under labor law. When the CPC finalized a $30 million settlement with SEIU 1199, a healthcare union, homecare workers called it “insulting.” From the settlement, each worker would receive, at most, $4,000—a sliver of the real stolen wages accumulated in the past decade. For example, Chan—lead plaintiff in the lawsuit—is alone owed an estimated $250,000 of overtime pay.
Looking ahead
Chen Liyi, a retired home care worker, took to the platform as the last speaker of the Women’s Day rally. She held up a paper copy of her speech in its original Mandarin and an English translation.
“Many of my fellow home attendant sisters and I are survivors of the violence of the 24-hour workday. We have permanently lost our health—no amount of money can buy it back—and some of our sisters have already passed away,” she said. “The 24-hour workday must stop immediately; it cannot be delayed even one more day!”
Chen then addressed Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a past advocate for No More 24. “Everyone, do we want Mayor Mandani to immediately abolish the 24-hour workday?” Her comrades shouted back, “Yes!”
Chen continued, “If Mayor Mandani still does not pass the bill within a week, we caregiver sisters will start on March 18 to hold a daily sit-in in front of City Hall until he passes the bill and abolishes the 24-hour workday!”
“We must let the mayor see our determination, right?”
“Right!”
“No More 24!”
“No More 24!”
Watch past People’s World coverage of this struggle:
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