Exploited Home Care Workers to NYC Mayor Mamdani: Prepare for a Worker Sit-In on Your Watch
Exploited and ripped off home care workers rallying outside the gates of City Hall on International Women’s Day say Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been actively delaying passage of the “No More 24” bill. Photos/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
Anyone who thought electing a mayor calling himself a “Democratic Socialist” would be enough to silence working class New Yorkers shunted aside and ignored under the leadership of Mayor Eric Adams, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, and Governor Kathy Hochul should take a look at the demonstration that took place outside City Hall on International Women's Day.
Hundreds of home care workers—the majority of them older women of color—and their supporters rallied outside the gates of City Hall on Mar. 8 calling on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to quit delaying passage of the “No More 24” bill—and promising to start a daily sit-in on Mar. 18 if he doesn’t.
“Mayor Mamdani, every day you delay the No More 24 Act is another day that we women workers suffer!” Home care worker Lai Yee Chan told demonstrators on Sunday. “What are you still waiting for? Do you want to collude with Governor Hochul and continue tormenting us women?”
Intro. 303—or the “No More 24” bill—last had a hearing on Feb. 18. If passed into law, it would set the maximum number of hours any home care employer could assign to any one employee at 12. City Council Member Chris Marte [D-1st District] lead sponsor of the “No More 24” bill, took particular aim at Hochul on Sunday, as well as her pick to be the next lieutenant governor—Adrienne Adams.
“In the four years that Adrienne Adams was speaker of the City Council she refused to push forward the No More 24 act,” the Council Member said. “She refused to talk at the table with home attendants—women, immigrants of color who have been giving their bodies and minds to the most vulnerable New Yorkers. Kathy Hochul has been governor for more than five years—instead of uplifting working women, she continues to oppress them.”
Mayor Mamdani told home care workers at a 2024 demonstration in Brooklyn that 24-hour shifts must end.
Hochul squashed a multi-year probe into wage theft claims in the home care worker industry in 2023. The DOL has determined that at least some individual home care workers forced to work round-the-clock shifts at roughly half the pay are owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen wages.
In 2023, the New York State Department of Labor informed home care worker Dellanira Soto that she was owed more than $330,000. Soto spent five years working round-the-clock shifts for an outfit called Royal Care while only being paid for roughly half the time she worked.
Home care workers, according to statute, can claim full pay for the 24-hour shifts they work if they do not get at least five uninterrupted hours of sleep.
Governor Hochul, however, continues to oppose efforts to restart the DOL wage theft investigation—regardless of a later ruling from a state Supreme Court Judge who annulled the decision to abandon it.
“Instead of acting for women, she continued to oppress them,” Council Member Marte continued this week. “She sided with home care agencies like CPC [Chinese-American Planning Council] and massive insurance companies to continue the status quo.”
The fight to pass the “No More 24” bill was just one piece of the “Working People’s Agenda” that home workers and their supporters brought to the gates of City Hall on International Women’s Day.
Home care workers rallying outside the gates of City Hall on International Women’s Day sent Mayor Mamdani a clear message.
They also called on the new mayoral administration to oppose the ongoing displacement of low-income workers, protect municipal retiree healthcare from privatization, and help to finally realize universal healthcare for all.
The Mamdani administration, however, is actually pushing ahead with plans to privatize and demolish the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea public houses on Manhattan’s west side—and has steadfastly opposed another bill from Council Member Marte shielding retiree healthcare from future attacks.
Municipal retirees successfully beat back former Mayor Eric Adams’ attempts to push them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan last year. Mayor Mamdani is also on record as a candidate pledging not to oppose a casino development in Queens that protesters at City Hall this week also vehemently oppose.
“We need to stop the 24-hour work shift—enough,” Chelsea Democratic District Leader and City Council candidate Layla Law-Gisiko declared. “And we need to give retirees the health care they were promised and that they earned—it is about time.”
Mayor Mamdani previously denounced the legal fiction that continues to allow home care workers to be subjected to dehumanizing 24-hour shifts while only paying them for 13 hours, telling protesters outside the DOL’s Brooklyn offices on Dec. 11, 2024 that round-the-clock shifts must end.
Hundreds of home care workers and their supporters filled the streets outside City Hall on Mar. 8.
“We know that those technical breakups of thirteen hours and eleven hours for so many workers [assigned 24-hour shifts] mean nothing—that you are working every single hour of that shift—and that must come to an end,” the then-mayoral candidate said.
Exploitation, according to Law-Gisiko, lies at the bottom of all these fights—whether it’s against displacement, privatized health care, or round-the-clock shifts.
“It’s taking from us—the workforce of New York,” she said, “[and] being exploited by special interests [and] by real estate interests.”
Council Member Marte remembers being at that Dec. 11, 2024 home care worker rally in Brooklyn, too
“Even as an early candidate for Mayor, Zohran Mamdani rallied outside of the Department of Labor with home attendants against the 24-hour shift,” Council Member Marte told Work-Bites before going to press on Monday. “So far, we have had very productive conversations with his team and the administering agency. The bill has continued to gain momentum in the Council, with a hearing that included testimony in unanimous support, and several new Council Members signing on as co-sponsors. We look forward to the bill passing as soon as possible so that these violent working conditions can finally come to an end.”
Whether or not that happens remains to be seen.
The new mayor still hasn’t responded to requests from the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees for a meeting to discuss passage of another bill from Council Member Marte to protect their traditional Medicare benefits. He has also not responded to public housing tenants in Chelsea seeking a meeting with Hizzoner to discuss the demolition of their communities.
Work-Bites has also made repeated attempts to reach the Mamdani administration for comment on this story—they have all gone unacknowledged and unanswered.