NYC Council Speaker Calls on No More 24 Combatants to Find a ‘Path Forward’
Home care workers advocating passage of the No More 24 bill have begun a two-week sit-in outside NYC Council Speaker Julie Menin’s apartment in Manhattan. Photos/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin is calling on No More 24 combatants to hammer out their differences this week after home care workers and their advocates brought the fight to end the 24-hour workday to her doorstep in Manhattan.
Advocates for Intro. 303—the No More 24 bill—kicked off a two-week sit-in outside the Speaker’s east side apartment on Tues. July 14 in a bid to get Menin to fulfill the pledge she made to them back in March to allow Intro. 303 onto the floor for a vote.
Council Member Chris Marte [D-1st District] is the prime sponsor of the bill which seeks to ban round-the-clock shifts in New York City’s home care industry—a system of institutionalized wage theft that routinely robs workers of 11 hours of pay and Mayor Zohran Mamdani is on record saying must end.
District Council 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido—head of the largest public sector union in the city and close ally of Mayor Mamdani—has vowed to kill the No More 24 bill, arguing his members actually want to work round-the-clock shifts and that mandating split 12-hour shifts would jeopardize patient care.
Xiulan Zhu denounces “greedy insurance companies” exploiting vulnerable home care workers.
The latest version of the No More 24 bill—Intro. 303 B—contains a special carve out exempting unionized home care workers from the round-the-clock ban and allows them to continue working 24-hour shifts.
No more 24 workers—largely older immigrant women of color owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases—want the carve out stricken from the bill insisting that it gives employers all the leverage they need to continue coercing hard-pressed employees to work round-the-clock shifts against their will.
The Speaker’s office told Work-Bites in an email this week that Menin remains “focused on phasing out the 24-hour workday,” calling it an “outdated practice that places workers under extreme physical and emotional strain.”
“There is more work to be and and she encourages all stakeholders to come to the table to help identity a viable and sustainable path forward,” a spokesperson for Menin added.
Flora Rosas [with mic.] and Rauina Duran deliver public testimony outside NYC Council Speaker’s Julie Menin’s doorstep on July 14 decrying the 24-hour workday’s impact on both home care workers and patients alike.
The Speaker, however, has not met with No More 24 advocates since last spring, when she initially promised Intro. 303 would get a vote.
On Tuesday, they charged the Speaker with attempting to sabotage the No More 24 bill, which presently remains in limbo and would probably need to be reintroduced if the union carve out were scrubbed.
“The whole world is watching you, Julie Menin. Your are not getting away with this crime,” New York City municipal retiree and No More 24 advocate Roberta Pikser said. “We demand that you keep your promise to submit Intro. 303 in its original form to the City Council.”
Xiulan Zhu, a home care attendant who spent a dozen years working round-clock-shifts called the 24-hour workday “torture.”
“You must understand that the disabled people we care for require round-the-clock, constant attention,” she said this week. “The greedy insurance companies and home care agencies not only deny real 24-hour care for patients, but are also slowly murdering us home care workers by destroying our health.”
No More 24 opponents argue that because home care services are funded through Medicaid at the state level, New York City cannot simply mandate split 12-hour shifts without causing huge cost increases on providers.
The two sides clashed outside City Hall in May with Garrido’s supporters going nose-to-nose with No More 24 advocates.
A coalition of DC37 active workers and retirees later defied Garrido and urged Speaker Menin to back the original unamended version of Intro. 303 without further delay.
“We took the Speaker at her word that she would act in good faith and keep her promise to finally end the inhumane and tortuous 24-hour workday that not only steals workers’ wages, but steals their health and their lives,” Kim Beck, a member of the Downtown Nasty Women activist group, said on Tuesday. “What we didn’t expect was that she would try to change the bill and cut out the unionized workers who make up nearly half of the workers. That is a betrayal.”