Home care workers stage hunger strike for Council bill banning 24-hour shifts

A group of home care workers is planning to hunger strike.

Photo by Max Parrott

For the last two years, a group of home care workers have been pushing a City Council bill to ban 24-hour shifts in their industry. Many of them have been rallying around this issue for almost 10 years. 

Though the bill gained some momentum in the City Council when it was introduced to the City Council a year and a half ago, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams never brought it for a vote, insisting it’s a state issue. Now a group of around two dozen have started a hunger strike to demand that the Speaker let the full Council decide on the issue.

“It’s not that we don’t cherish our health. We know that hunger striking harms the body and causes great damage to us, but we have no choice,” said home aide Guihua Song in a speech that was translated into English. “Working 24 hours a day for a long time, our bodies have been tortured, broken down, and full of aches and pains. We cannot care for our children and families.”

The group of workers who will be rallying in front of City Hall during the strike for at least the next week are mostly aging women of color. 

“Someone recently said to me to convince us not to hunger strike. He say, you’re too old. You are too sick,” said Wing Lam, who leads the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, a Chinatown worker center that has played a key role in the fight for the bill. “I say 24 hours is still going on. We, the people, are not cockroaches.”

Speaker Adams told reporters Tuesday that she supports the workers’ “desire for improved working conditions” but that the issue has to be resolved at the state level in order to include Medicaid funding.

“We keep saying this. We cannot change State Department of Labor regulations or Medicaid reimbursement,” she said.

New York state law that mandates health aides can only be paid for 13 hours for each shift, which includes an unpaid eight-hour period for…