Oppressed NYC Workers to Speaker Adams: ‘Which Side Are You On?’

Home health aides subjected to 24 hr work days fill the sidewalks outside City Hall this week. Photos by Steve Wishnia

By Steve Wishnia

Editor’s Note: This story has been revised to include a statement from Speaker Adrienne Adams.

Protesting home health-care aides put a twist on the 19th-century labor slogan for an eight-hour day Oct. 18: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” Many carried signs in 1880s-style imagery with a triptych of a woman at a loom, a person sleeping, and a couple reading a newspaper on top —and below that, a woman helping a gray-haired elder with a walker and the legend “24 Hours for Work, None for Rest, None for What We Will,” in Chinese, Spanish, and English.

The demonstration, which filled two blocks of the wide sidewalk by City Hall Park, was mainly aimed at City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams. It demanded that she schedule a vote on Intro 175A, the No More 24 Act, a bill intended to end the practice of having home health aides work 24-hour shifts while getting paid for only 13 hours.

“¡Trabajamos DUROS!” health aide Rosa Dolmo shouted into the microphone. “Speaker Adams, you talk about racism, but you’re a fraud. You maintain the 24-hour workday,” she continued, speaking in Spanish through a translator. “We work so hard, and you step on us like we’re cockroaches.”

“This is modern-day slavery,” Councilmember Christopher Marte (D-Manhattan), the bill’s lead sponsor, told the crowd. “Put Intro 175A to a vote so we can finally stop this inhumane practice.”

Intro. 175A — like Intro. 1099 safeguarding municipal retiree healthcare from privatization — is another pro-worker piece of legislation being suppressed by NYC Council Speaker Adrienne Adams.

The Council has not taken any action on the bill since the Civil Service and Labor Committee held a hearing on it in September 2022, and the number of sponsors has fallen from 27 to 13. Marte told Work-Bites that it had been modified to address some criticisms, such as objections by District Council 37’s Local 389, which represents more than 6,000 home-care workers, that its limits on weekly hours would prevent workers from making extra money through overtime.

The amended version also includes an educational-outreach program for both workers and employers, Marte added, and would not go into effect until a few months after it’s enacted, “so people have time to change their schedules.” But Speaker Adams is blocking it, he said.

“We have an amended version of the bill that the Speaker refuses to post,” he said. “I’m sure there’s a lot of special interests pushing her not to move forward.”

A city council spokesperson sent a statement to Work-Bites insisting Speaker Adams “supports workers, and the Council is focused on advancing meaningful solutions to protect them.”

“The path forward to address 24-hour home care must occur at the state level, given [that] the regulatory and payment structures that govern home-care work flow through state Medicaid,” the statement said. “To resolve this issue and deliver for home-care workers and the people they care for, advocacy for policy change must be focused on the state level. When Intro 175 had a hearing last fall, this position was reiterated by several stakeholders, including state legislators and disability advocates.”

Retired home-care worker Shu Zhen Ruan told the crowd that she’d injured her hand while trying to catch her paralyzed client when he fell. Because she was doing 24-hour shifts, she added, she couldn’t get time off to see a doctor until it was too late to treat the injury properly.

Home health aides advocating for the No More 24 Act rally in large numbers on Broadway Wednesday afternoon.

“You see my arm: It has lost strength and I cannot straighten it,” she said. “Many home attendants working 24-hour workdays like me were injured, some even suffered more seriously and cannot even stand up. Speaker Adams, come see it for yourself: This is the damage of 24-hour workday on us!”

Martha Cameron, a member of the Cross-Union Retirees Organizing Committee, drew a parallel with the city’s efforts to switch retired city workers’ health-care coverage to a private Medicare Advantage plan. “Our struggle mirrors yours,” she told the crowd. “This is theft. Theft of our wages, theft of our health care, and theft of our lives.”

“What I see is the same forces at work. Our unions are colluding with the bosses to sell us out,” she told Work-Bites, and when a bill is introduced to remedy the situation, “Speaker Adams will not bring it to the floor.”

Carmen De La Rosa (D-Manhattan), chair of the Civil Service and Labor Committee, told Work-Bites last month that her committee would not hold a hearing on a bill to let retirees stay in traditional Medicare because it would violate “protocol” to do so without the Speaker’s approval.

The rally was “part of our final push” to get a vote on the bill in the two-and-a-half months before the Council session ends, Marte told Work-Bites. If it is not passed this year, it would have to be reintroduced next year and start the process from scratch.

The Ain’t I A Woman Campaign is planning to hold another rally Nov. 16.