Home Care Workers to Hochul: ‘We’re Not Going to Accept Crumbs!’
Home health aides rallying in Brooklyn this week demand Governor Kathy Hochul do her job and enforce the law against wage theft. Photos/Steve Wishnia
By Steve Wishnia
Almost a year after a judge told the state Department of Labor that it had wrongly closed hundreds of wage-theft investigations, home health attendants and supporters demanded that it enforce the law in a demonstration outside its downtown Brooklyn office Oct. 8.
“We have some of the strongest wage-theft laws in the nation,” Assemblymember Ron Kim (D-Queens) told the more than 200 people there. Governor Kathy Hochul, he added, should “enforce the law and do your job.”
Wage theft has been built into the home-care system for decades. A 1960 state regulation put attendants who do 24-hour shifts in a category similar to live-in domestic servants. They are supposed to have 11 hours off to sleep and eat, so they get paid only for the 13 hours they are on the clock. After years of protest and litigation by attendants who insisted that this was unfair because they had to get up several times a night to take care of their patients, the state Court of Appeals ruled in 2019 that they had to get paid for the full 24 hours of every shift where they could document that they hadn’t gotten at least five hours of sleep.
Home health aides pack the street outside the DOL’s Hanson Place offices in Brooklyn on Oct. 8, demanding to be paid for their work.
More than 550 attendants filed such claims. But in April 2023, the Labor Department sent letters informing about 200 of them that their cases had been closed, on the grounds that their union contracts mandated that they go to arbitration. They filed a class-action suit, and in October 2024, state Supreme Court Judge Gerald W. Connolly held that the department had violated state rulemaking procedures, because it had ended the investigations for the whole group, cutting off the chance of examining the evidence in individual cases.
Georgina Abreu, now 85, told Work-Bites that she had filed a complaint with the Labor Department seeking about $50,000 in back wages after 20 years of doing 24-hour shifts for first Chinese Presbyterian. “I got a letter from them saying ‘we closed your case,’” she said, speaking in Spanish through a translator.
She had been offered a share of the arbitration settlement reached by 1199SEIU in 2022, but says she turned it down because it wasn’t enough money. The deal divided $30 million among 5,000 to 8,500 workers, an average of less than 10% of what she was owed.
“We’re not going to accept crumbs,” Abreu said. “This is why we’re mad.”
The Labor Department is appealing the ruling. A spokesperson said it does not comment on pending litigation.
A year later, says Sarah Ahn, an organizer with the Ain’t I A Woman campaign, “it’s just been a matter of delay.”
Assemblymember Kim accuses the department of selectively enforcing the law, going after smaller employers, “but leaving the bigger ones alone.” Those include American Business Institute (ABI), Royal Care, and the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC) agencies.
“I think they’re going after the less politically connected employers,” he told Work-Bites. “The name of the game is to scale up until you can’t be touched. It’s the absolute worst message you can send.”
Assembly Member Ron Kim [l] and Council Member Chris Marte [r] speak to home care workers rallying against wage theft in Brooklyn this week.
The Labor Department fined ABI more than $9 million for wage theft in 2022, according to Comptroller Brad Lander’s office, and Royal Care was fined $5.85 million. But attendants employed by those two companies still haven’t received back wages, says Ahn. The department has gotten full or close to full back pay for some attendants at smaller employers, she adds—but it has also called up workers who filed wage-theft complaints and told them that their cases would be closed if they didn’t take a settlement for five to ten cents on the dollar.
Ain’t I A Woman estimates that CPC, which employs 4,500 home-care attendants, owes $90 million in unpaid back wages for 24-hour shifts.
CPC has said that it now has 77 clients who require 24-hour care, 39 who get it from 80 employees doing 24-hour shifts and 38 who are cared for in 12-hour split shifts. It states that it would like to end 24-hour shifts, but the city and insurance companies insist that it take them, and Medicaid won’t reimburse it for more than 13 hours of wages.
Last fall, Gov. Hochul named CPC one of the four lead regional coordinators for home care—officially called the “Consumer-Directed Personal Assistance Program” (CDPAP)—in the state. Its territory is New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County. The move was part of the governor’s centralization of Medicaid payments for the program. They now go through only one “fiscal intermediary,” a company called Public Partnerships LLC (PPL).
Gui Zhu Chen, 67, one of the plaintiffs in the 2023 class-action lawsuit that led to Judge Connolly’s decision, filed a wage-theft complaint against CPC in 2015, seeking about $20,000 in back pay for 24-hour shifts. Her bosses told her to document every time she had to get up during the night—“I had to wake up six or seven times,” she told Work-Bites, speaking in Taishanese Chinese through a translator—but when she kept doing it, she says, they threatened to file charges against her for “lying to the government.”
Eventually, in 2021, they simply stopped giving her work. The lawsuit estimates that CPC owes her $171,000.
If workers aren’t paid in full for their labor, state Senate Labor Committee chair Jessica Ramos (D-Queens) told the demonstrators, “it’s called slavery.”
“If we claim to value dignity, then enforcing labor law isn’t optional. It’s a moral obligation. Every hour worked must be an hour paid,” Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado said in a statement read at the rally. “You shouldn’t have to beg the government to do its job.”