New York, New York — Dozens of home care workers settled in outside New York City Hall on Wednesday for an open-ended sit-in, demanding that Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council pass legislation that would ban 24-hour work shifts — a practice workers say has battered their bodies and stolen years of their lives.
The protest marked the latest escalation in a fight that has stretched more than a decade. Under current state rules, home care workers can be assigned to 24-hour shifts but are compensated for just 13 of those hours — as long as employers document three hours of meal breaks and at least five hours of uninterrupted sleep. Workers say that documentation rarely matches reality.
“The 24-hour shift is abuse, plain and simple,” said Mireya Silva, 73, a retired home care aide who says she was forced out of the workforce early due to spinal injuries, stress fractures in her hands, and years of chronic pain accumulated on the job. Another worker, Nu Jun Zhu, 62, says she is owed more than $200,000 in unpaid wages after a decade of round-the-clock assignments.
The pending bill, re-introduced by City Councilmember Christopher Marte in January, would cap shifts at 12 hours. It has 17 sponsors but hasn’t made it to a floor vote — and hours after the sit-in began, news broke that the Council Speaker had not placed it on the agenda for the March 26 meeting, pushing any vote to next month at the earliest.
The nursing home connection
For the long-term care industry, the outcome of this fight is anything but a side issue.
1199SEIU, the powerful healthcare workers union, said it fully supports ending 24-hour shifts — but only if the legislation includes full Medicaid funding to cover the additional hours. Without that funding, the union warned, “consumers” could be “forced into nursing homes” and caregivers could lose their jobs.
That warning carries real weight. Home care programs are funded through Medicaid and administered by agencies that depend on state reimbursement rates set in Albany. The City Council controls none of that. Simply capping shift lengths without adjusting reimbursement could leave agencies unable to cover a second caregiver for the same patient — and families unable to afford the gap. For many patients, programs that keep vulnerable seniors out of nursing homes are already under financial pressure.
The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection said at a February hearing that it supported the bill’s intent but flagged the same concern: ending 24-hour shifts without additional Medicaid dollars could have “unintended consequences for patients and workers.”
Mayor Mamdani’s office said he is “committed to working alongside home care workers, the Council, and state government” to pass stronger worker protections. But state lawmakers have historically resisted similar proposals over fiscal concerns, and there’s no indication that Albany is moving toward additional funding in the near term.
A workforce holding the system together
The workers at the center of this fight are mostly elderly immigrant women from Asia and Latin America. Many of the patients they serve are the same population that would otherwise cycle into nursing facilities — seniors and people with disabilities who rely on around-the-clock care at home.
If the bill moves without a funding fix, the calculus for thousands of families could change overnight. More patients needing placement. More pressure on already-strained nursing home capacity. And a caregiving workforce that’s already stretched thin, pushed to its breaking point in a different way.
The sit-in was still ongoing as of this writing. No date has been set for a Council vote.
