NYC Home Care Workers and Retirees ‘Fight for Their Lives’ As City Council Speaker Focuses On Mayoral Bid

Hundreds gathered outside the gates of City Hall on May Day to call out City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’ inaction on bills aimed at helping home care workers and municipal retirees. Photos/Steve Wishnia

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By Steve Wishnia

The amplified chant calling out City Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Adrienne Adams could be heard a block west of City Hall May 1, as several hundred people filled the sidewalk for a “Fight for Our Health and Lives” rally.

The protest demanded that Adams allow votes on bills to abolish 24-hour shifts for home health-care aides and to require the city to continue providing traditional Medicare coverage for retired employees, and repeal Mayor Eric Adams “City of Yes” rezoning plan.

The Speaker has “really thwarted” both bills, a spokesperson for the Coalition to Fight for Our Health and Lives said.

“What we’re demanding today is a hearing and a vote to end 24-hour shifts,” Councilmember Christopher Marte (D-Manhattan), lead sponsor of the two bills, told Work-Bites.

The main objections to 24-hour shifts are that workers get paid for only 13 of those hours, under the legal fiction that they are getting 11 hours off to eat and sleep, and that the shifts are physically punishing. “It broke my body,” Reina Caba, who did 24-hour shifts for six years, told the crowd.

The Council has not taken any action in the past two years on either Intro 615, the bill to abolish 24-hour shifts for home health aides, or Intro 1096, the traditional-Medicare measure.

Intro 615 was modified to meet objections to a previous version by unions representing home health aides, who said that putting a strict limit on how many hours they could work would hurt workers who need the money from overtime. The revised bill generally limits aides’ shifts to 12 hours within a 24-hour period, but it allows up to two hours a day more in emergencies, and lets them work more than 56 hours in a week if the employer gives two weeks advance notice, gets their written consent, and documents it with a government agency.

New York City municipal retiree Michelle Keller stands with home care workers calling on NYC Council Speaker Adrienne Adams to drop her ongoing opposition to Intros. 615 and 1096.

The goal was to avoid creating a loophole where workers could be forced into doing extra hours they don’t want, Marte says.

Intro 615 has only 14 sponsors, however, including Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Seven, including Marte, are members of the Progressive Caucus, and all are Democrats except for Kristy Marmorato of the Bronx.

Marte says there is “growing momentum” for it, though. 1199SEIU no longer opposes the bill, and he’s encouraged by the size of the coalition supporting it. The rally also drew retired city workers angry at Mayor Eric Adams’ administration trying to switch their health care to for-profit Medicare Advantage plans. More than 40 organizations, among them tenant and neighborhood associations, Democratic Party clubs, and leftist groups endorsed it.

Intro 1096 also has 14 sponsors, with eight signing on since December. They are Progressive Caucus members Shekar Krishnan of Queens and Shahana Hanif and Alexa Aviles of Brooklyn; Manhattan liberals Erik Bottcher and Gale Brewer; Mercedes Narcisse of Brooklyn and Rafael Salamanca Jr. of the Bronx; and Republican Joann Ariola of Queens.

Including Marte, the bill’s lead sponsor, the number of Progressive Caucus members backing the bill now equals the number of Trump supporters, at four each. 

“The City Council does not control Medicaid or home health-care regulations and cannot deliver the changes that these workers and advocates want to see, because the state maintains this authority,” a Council spokesperson responded in a statement. “Speaker Adams doesn't want to see any workers face harmful, unjust working conditions,” they added, but “efforts must be focused on changes at the state level,” and “arguments to the contrary are either misinformed or misleading and irresponsible.” 

Home care workers still being forced to work round-the-clock shifts at roughly half the pay keep the pressure on New York City Council Speaker and mayoral hopeful Adrienne Adams.

The Council passed a resolution in March 2024 calling on the state Legislature and governor to increase the wages and improve the working conditions of home care workers.

Assemblymember Ron Kim (D-Queens) disputes the belief that the state would have to increase Medicaid funding dramatically to give workers 24 hours’ pay for working 24-hour shifts. Insurance companies bill Medicaid for 24-hour shifts, he told Work-Bites, and there’s no auditing to see how much of that goes to the workers or the agencies that hire them. He says the best solution would be to cut out the insurance-company middlemen and pay the agencies directly.

“Workers should be treated as public servants,” Kim says. “This is a public-service job.”

The Speaker’s office also opposes Intro 1096, the measure to prevent the city from switching all municipal retirees into Medicare Advantage. “Currently, there are multiple lawsuits regarding the city’s coverage and payment of health care for its employees, including a new one this week,” it said. “The Council interfering in this dispute would only add another lawsuit and prolong reaching a real resolution for all involved.”

Mayor Adams’“City of Yes” plan, passed by the Council last December, will rezone large parts of the city in an effort to encourage building new housing. The mayor claimed it will enable 80,000 new homes over the next 15 years.

But unlike former mayor Bill de Blasio’s housing program, which sought to enforce trickle-down from luxury development by mandating that 25%-30% of apartments built under rezoning be below market rate, any “affordable housing” built under City of Yes would be voluntary. The program lets developers build 20% additional units in a project if all the extra units are affordable, defined as an average rent of $1,700 a month for a single person or $2,187 for a family of three.

That should be called “displacement for all,” Howard Brandstein of the Coalition to Protect Chinatown and the Lower East Side told the rally: It’s “based on the ludicrous proposition that building more luxury housing will create more affordable housing.”