By Steve Wishnia

With a bill to end home health-care aides’ punishing 24-hour shifts on hold in the City Council, activists are planning a rally outside City Hall Wednesday, Apr. 12, to push Speaker Adrienne Adams to schedule a vote on the measure.

“We’re trying to cut through any delays that are holding up the Speaker and finally rectify decades of injustice,” Caitlin Kelmar, chief of staff for Councilmember Christopher Marte, the bill’s lead sponsor, told Work-Bites.

The bill, Intro 175-A, would prohibit home care aides, who take care of an estimated 18,000 people in the city who are infirm enough to need around-the-clock care, from working more than 12 hours in a 24-hour period except in emergencies. Workers have complained for years that the 24-hour shifts are physically punishing and that the system relies on a legal fiction that justifies wage theft: They’re supposed to have 11 hours off for sleep, meals, and breaks, so they only get paid for 13 hours.

Intro 175-A, however, has been laid over in the Council’s Civil Service and Labor Committee, with no action since hearings on it last September. “There is no vote currently scheduled,” a spokesperson for committee chair Carmen De La Rosa (D-Manhattan) said.

“Home attendants really put on record the horrors of doing 24-hour shifts and how they’re treated,” says Sarah Ahn, a spokesperson for the Ain’t I A Woman campaign, which is organizing the Wednesday rally. “How is the Speaker saying the wage theft of millions of dollars is allowed?”

“Intro 175-A had a hearing and continues to go through the Council's legislative process,” a Council spokesperson told Work-Bites.

The delay has come despite the bill being amended to meet objections raised at the September hearing. It would not go into effect until Oct. 1, in order to give the state time to appropriate funds for the increased wages, as 24-hour care is generally paid for by Medicaid. At the hearing, several disabled people’s organizations, nonprofit agencies that provide home care, and 1199SEIU, the main union representing aides, said that while workers deserved to get paid for all the hours they worked, failing to fund that would endanger care.

The other amendments would mandate that agencies give aides written notice of their rights under the law, and cap the maximum workweek at 56 hours, up from 50 in the original version. Aides would be allowed to work more than 56 hours if the agency gave them two weeks’ advance notice and they consented, and the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection would audit agencies it thought were requesting excess hours too often.

One bright spot, says Ahn, is that the state Labor Department has begun enforcing a rule that aides must get paid if they aren’t getting enough rest. The department, she says, has made it clear that “if you get even a minute less than five hours’ uninterrupted sleep, the agency has to pay you for the full 24 hours.”

“These are sick patients,” she adds. “They’re human. You can’t turn them off.”

The Labor Department said it couldn’t release data on how many claims workers had filed about not getting enough rest without a Freedom of Information Law request. But a spreadsheet provided by Ain’t I A Woman campaign says 554 aides have filed such claims, and the department has calculated they are owed a total of $64.6 million, including damages for 50% of the unpaid wages. More than 150 of those claims are for more than $150,000, including damages, and six are for more than $400,000, the largest $490,900.

Home health aides typically get paid $17 an hour. The overwhelming majority are women, mostly Asian, Latina, and African or Afro-Caribbean immigrants.

However, there are likely several steps remaining before they can collect their back-pay claims, the Labor Department says. While it is investigating a claim, it tries to resolve the dispute by mediation and other methods. If it gives the employer an “order to comply,” it continues trying to resolve the issue, and the employer may appeal the order to the state Industrial Board of Appeals. Once the amounts found due are declared final, the department may refer it for a judgment. If that’s not paid, it can turn the order over to the claimants or their advocates for collection, or use standard collection techniques, such as restraining the employer’s bank accounts.

Intro 175-A would mean that home care aides no longer have to work 24 hours for 13 hours’ pay, says Kelmar, but “it’s important that the bill needs to be passed before the end of the year.” If it isn’t, she says, it would have to be reintroduced in the next session and go through another hearing. If it’s delayed until later this year, it might get shunted aside by the city budget process, summer, and the fall election campaign.