Home health aides will rally outside the state Department of Labor’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan at 11 a.m. on Wednesday to protest the agency’s decision to stop investigating their complaints of wage theft. It’s an issue that New York home care workers said is rampant, particularly when they work 24-hour shifts, and they have been sounding the alarm about the problem for years.
The demonstration comes after five home care workers filed a petition in state Supreme Court last week to get the labor department to reopen its investigations into their wage theft complaints, which they recently learned had been closed. The group of workers argue their complaints are representative of labor abuses throughout the industry and are seeking class-action status.
All of the complaints are related to home health aides allegedly being underpaid while working around the clock in their elderly or disabled clients’ homes. State policy allows these workers to be paid for just 13 hours of a 24-hour shift, as long as they also receive sufficient time for sleep and meals. In recent years, home care workers have tried and failed to successfully challenge that rule in court.
Many said the home care staffing agencies they work for have also declined to properly compensate them during shifts when they can’t get the requisite sleep and meal time, and some have turned to the Department of Labor to enforce the law. Dozens of workers attested to their underpayment under the 13-hour system during a labor department hearing on the issue in 2018.
“As a government agency, the Department of Labor should enforce the law and give us justice,” said Gui Hua Song, a retired home attendant named in the lawsuit against the state, in an emailed statement to Gothamist.
According to the petition, Song routinely had to change one of her clients’ diapers and reposition her throughout the night while working multiple days in a row, but was never compensated for more than 13 hours of each…
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