No More 24: A Movement to Abolish 24-hour Workdays for NYC’s Home Care Workers

This article was updated on August 5, 2026.

The decade-long battle to abolish mandatory 24-hour shifts for New York City’s home care workers—most of whom are immigrant women of color—has reached a critical moment. Having failed to pass twice, the third version of the No More 24 Act (Intro. 303-2026) is stalled in the Committee on Civil Service and Labor after the Legal Aid Society joined with Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani to oppose the bill. The No More 24 Act would split the 24-hour workday into two 12-hour shifts— a practice already recognized by New York state’s Department of Health.

In a joint letter, the Legal Aid Society and 17 other groups claiming to represent disabled New Yorkers urged the City Council to oppose Intro. 303. They argued the proposal would be destabilizing as “it attempts to solve serious problems in our home care system in isolation from the state government which funds and administers these systems completely” and would force, the letter states, those who depend on round-the-clock care into institutions. Many in the disability community, however, have rejected these claims as “fearmongering” and united with the workers against a system they say exploits them all and in favor of the act.

Solidarity in Action: NYC’s Home Care Workers and Disabled Activists

Hundreds of home care workers—alongside disabled activists and supporters—gathered outside the Legal Aid Society in Lower Manhattan on May 11, 2026, to refute the idea that workers’ rights conflict with the interests of the disabled. Many leaned on canes for support, some held signs with messages like “Legal Aid and Mamdani: Stop Disabling Women!,” while others wore boards shaped as stop-signs with one clear-cut demand: “Stop the 24-hr Workday Now.”

Among the supporters was disabled activist Adrian Easterling. “I have been on the receiving end of burnt-out, exploited, and sleep-deprived caregivers,” he told the crowd, recounting how he was accidentally knocked out of his wheelchair due to his caregiver’s exhaustion after being awake for 24 hours.

Easterling is also one of over 70 home care recipients and disability activists who have signed an open letter calling on Council Speaker Julie Menin and Mayor Mamdani to pass Intro. 303. “We spend day and night together in extremely vulnerable and intimate situations. Did you think a sense of care and camaraderie would not bloom from that?”

The Ain’t I A Woman?! Campaign, a woman-led coalition formed by the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association, and the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, have mobilized to pass the No More 24 Act since it was first introduced by City Council Member Christopher Marte in 2022. After that bill and another version in 2024 were never brought to vote, a win seemed to be in sight with the latest version. Intro. 303 gained wide support among the City Council and a vote was expected on March 26, until Mamdani unexpectedly proposed changes to the bill’s language. The mayor’s intervention came after Gov. Hochul reportedly threatened to withhold funding for the bill’s increased Medicaid costs, a move that was quickly followed by opposition from the Legal Aid Society and District Council 37, New York City’s largest public sector union. City Council Speaker Menin pulled the bill before it could be voted on, and no new date has yet been set for a vote.

Systemic Failures and Their Health Impacts

The New York State Department of Labor (DOL) allows home care agencies to pay employees for only 13 hours of a 24-hour shift, as long as they are allowed three hours for meal breaks and at least five hours of uninterrupted sleep. But since workers are required to be available at all times to perform necessary tasks like turning patients over in their beds to prevent bed sores and helping them to use the bathroom several times a night, in reality these women are unable to engage in continuous sleep or take the allotted breaks. The workers receive no pay for their overnight hours. After years of working these grueling shifts up to five times a week, often two or three times consecutively, the women suffer from major health challenges including permanently disabling bone damage, heart disease, chronic insomnia, as well as irreparable damage to their family lives.

The workers’ situation is made even more precarious in that the union only counts 13 hours of a 24-hour shift toward their quotas, as well as toward earning their pensions and social security benefits. Workers are subject to union agreements that require at least 130 hours per month in order to receive healthcare benefits. If they don’t meet that quota in a month, they get kicked off their health insurance and are required to have three consecutive months of maintaining the 130 hours per month before the union will put them back on their health insurance plan.

In a letter to the US Department of State, dated April 2026, the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls raised serious concern about these working conditions noting several indicators of forced labor as established by the International Labour Organization:

“Without prejudicing the accuracy of these allegations, we would like to express our serious concern at the treatment of home care workers required to endure 24-hour shifts, which would appear to allow a practice of exploitation disproportionately affecting migrant women. Such practice would violate these women’s human rights to just and humane working conditions, equality and non-discrimination, health, privacy and family life, liberty and security of person, equal protection of the law, humane and non-degrading treatment, access to justice and remedies, freedom from violence and exploitation, and life with dignity. . . We are further concerned that the undervaluation of care and support work and the denial of decent work for paid care and support workers, and concentration of women in the care sector increase poverty and social exclusion of women care and support workers, particularly those who are migrant workers.”

The No More 24 Act’s original language attempts to remedy these challenges by effectively banning these extreme working conditions, prohibiting home care employers from assigning any home care employee shifts totaling more than 12 hours in any 24-hour period. The Legal Aid Society’s position is that this needs to be legislated at the state level—although NY Senator Harvey Epstein introduced a similar bill in 2021 that failed to pass. The District Council 37 (AFSCME, AFL-CIO) union seeks to kill the bill on the basis that an outright ban would jeopardize home health aides’ benefits and right to earn overtime, and a generalized concern that the city would need an additional $460 million of funding to cover these costs. Although most of the city’s home care workforce are represented by 1199 SEIU, not DC37, the bill’s language has now been amended to acknowledge DC37’s positioning, excluding some union members from the proposed 24-hour work restrictions and allowing workers to opt-in to work beyond the 56-hour per week limit.

These revisions were met with angry backlash from home care workers, who say this language will allow agencies to continue to force 24-hour shifts on them. They have accused Hochul of acting in the interest of the health insurance companies who profit from this practice and Mamdani of colluding with the governor while reneging on his campaign promise to end the 24-hour workday.

Making Their Voices Known

 For five weeks in March and April, home health aides—most of them elderly women—assembled outside City Hall for daily sit-ins, as well as a week-long hunger strike to demand City Council Speaker Menin bring the bill to vote as it was originally written.

One of these women was Lai Yee Chan, who worked 24-hour days as a home attendant for 22 years and had to stop in 2022 due to a shoulder injury she sustained while lifting a client. She still experiences pain in her neck and ribs and has chronic insomnia from years of constant sleep deprivation.

In 2014, the family of Chan’s patient, seeing how difficult it was for her to provide proper care on 24-hour shifts, asked the insurance company to split her shifts. The company, Healthfirst, sent a nurse to observe her shifts for three nights, who confirmed that Chan had no opportunity to sleep during this time. The following month, Healthfirst approved the split shift.

Zishun Ning, a member of the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, has seen many cases where the patient’s family, seeing the danger of having one worker take care of the patient day and night, will make this appeal. In an interview with NPQ, Ning shared that in most cases after sending someone to see the attendant work, insurance companies approve the split. “So that’s what the bill is about, to just make split shifts a standard practice.”

Though Chan took part in the Ain’t I A Woman?! Campaign’s previous hunger strike, after the bill was reintroduced in 2024, she wasn’t able to join the most recent one because she had to have surgery for her leg. In an interview with NPQ, she explained that many of the home attendants are unable to participate in hunger strikes because they have so many health problems caused by their brutal working conditions and their doctors advise against it. Chan said doing a hunger strike was easy after the physical and mental torture she experienced on these shifts. “In comparison, the hunger strike was nothing. The 24-hour workday is much worse,” she said.

While Mamdani never came outside to speak with the protestors during the sit-in, he sent a staffer to talk to them at one point who told them that they had consented to working their 24-hour shifts. When these women apply to work for home care agencies, the form they must fill out asking if they are willing to work a 24-hour live-in situation. But Kim Beck, a co-leader of the Downtown Nasty Women’s Social Group, explained that if the women “don’t tick that box, then they don’t get other shifts . . . there’s really no such thing as consent.”

“Mamdani’s claim is ridiculous because it’s not about whether we agree to it, but about how it’s affecting our health,” Chan added.

Ning told NPQ that many home care workers have expressed that they feel betrayed because they supported Mamdani and even mobilized their families and friends to vote for him. “The fact that he won is, I think, because many workers thought he would be different.” Ning calls it “pretty insulting” that Mamdani sent a staffer to say that workers want to work 24-hour days.

“We had hours of workers testifying at the City Council committee hearing for this, and not a single worker came forward and said that they want to work 24-hour shift,” said Beck. “It’s just a racist trope and it’s a way to further the abuse of these women.”

The History Behind a Decade-Long Fight for Fairness and Dignity

Chan took one of the first steps to abolish this practice in 2015 when she organized her co-workers to file two class action lawsuits against their employer, the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC), for wage theft. Assembly member Ron Kim, put out a report documenting CPC’s labor violations, which details how the nonprofit diverted these cases from the courts to arbitration with 1199 SEIU. In the report, plaintiffs testify that when they told their supervisors they weren’t able to rest on their shifts, CPC instructed them to limit overnight care and warn patients’ families that they would be sent to nursing homes if they continued asking for help at night.

An arbitrator has issued.

Seven years of arbitration resulted in a “historic $30 million arbitration award covering more than 100,000 current and former 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East bargaining unit members employed at 42 home care agencies, including CPC. The award does “not resolve the multitude of wage and hour issues facing non-1199 home care workers.”

Chan called the award decision an “insulting” settlement—amounting to no more than a thousand dollars per worker—despite a SEIU 1199 finding that home care workers were owed more than $6 billion as of 2019. Chan and many others declined to sign the agreement when the union wouldn’t disclose how much money they each would receive through this deal. She still has yet to receive any of the back wages CPC owes her.

Chan is one of over 100 workers represented by Legal Aid Society in a lawsuit alleging the DOL failed to enforce labor law by dropping wage theft claims by approximately 120 home attendants. Those workers responded to Legal Aid’s letter opposing Intro. 303 with their own open letter: “Legal Aid, as our own lawyers, knows for many years that 24-hour workday is sleepless torture…you took hundreds of millions in funding from Gov. Hochul every year, but for the past 7 years, you haven’t recovered a single penny of back pay for over one hundred home care workers who you represent!”

The Other Side of the Debate

Legal Aid’s open letter predicts that if signed into law, this bill will “lead to a complete destabilization and collapse of the home care system.” Among the other signatories were disability advocacy NGOs like New York Association on Independent Living (NYAIL). Jose Hernandez, an advocate with NYAIL who uses a wheelchair due to a spinal cord injury, spoke out against Intro. 303 at a City Council disability committee hearing, expressing fears that people who depend on 24-hour home care would be institutionalized due to the cost of paying caregivers for every hour worked. At the urging of Hernandez and other advocates, Council member Shahana Hanif withdrew her co-sponsorship of the bill later that week.

Framing the debate as a choice between justice for disabled people and justice for their caregivers sparked outrage. In an open letter authored by disabled activists Keith Rosenthal and Arielle Concilio Parra, they write, “We know well that disabled people have much to lose (and potentially gain) in the outcome of this fight. But we know, too, that the battle lines in this fight are not primarily between disabled people and the home care workers.”

The letter’s authors and signatories blame instead medical insurance companies, home care corporations, and politicians, rejecting their professed concern for the disabled as a disingenuous alibi.

The letter also links to a statement by one disabled person that reads, “Legal Aid offends disabled people by presenting the abusive 24-hour workday as necessary to get the care we deserve and autonomy over the conditions of our lives. It is absolutely possible for disabled people to receive care without entrenching a system that exactly disables and enslaves workers.”

Many rank-and-file union members have aligned with home care workers to pass the No More 24 Act, even as union bosses try to squash it. They say they weren’t consulted on this stance and have joined counterprotests and even published an op-ed dismantling the leaders’ argument.

By opposing Intro. 303, Ning argues the union serves insurance company interests over its own since the bill would mean more members, more jobs, and similar pay for half the work. “So, it’s good for workers, good for disabled people, good for the union. The only people who suffer a little bit are the insurance companies, who already make tons of profit.”

With the No More 24 Act stalled in committee, the coalition has called on Menin to submit the original Intro. 303 so the Council can vote on it. “We hope that she’s still committed to bringing this to a vote and to supporting it,” said Beck, “because every day that she delays is another day that there’s abuse of these women and that they have to experience more torture and more exploitation.”