Why All Hospital Workers Must Fight for “No More 24”!

For a full 7 days in April, home care workers were on hunger strike at City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan. Their demand was simple: the city council must pass a bill to ban 24-hour work shifts (Intro 303). They were on a hunger strike because they were betrayed by the leaders of their union, 1199SEIU, who have opposed their just demands for years, and left them with no other way of fighting.

Not only are these immigrant women forced to work 24-hour shifts, they are only paid for 13 hours. It is impossible to provide quality care in these conditions as the carer’s health suffers. But the union leaders did a deal to get union dues from these workers and prevent them from fighting against this system of semi-slavery. While 1199 has officially dropped its opposition to the bill, it is still not doing what it needs to do to actually fight for their members. This is an outrage! The union should use its strength to force the bosses to meet the workers’ demands.

The hunger strike was put on pause on April 22 when Speaker Julie Menin said she would support the bill and bring it to a vote on May 14. But the promises of Democrats aren’t worth the paper they are written on. Mamdani said he supported the bill as recently as March, before he stabbed the workers in the back, blocking with Governor Hochul to pressure other Democrats to oppose the bill. The role of the Democrats all along has been to keep this exploitation legal.

The defenders of this exploitation try to make a false division between workers and patients, saying that if the workers get better conditions there won’t be enough Medicaid money to provide 24-hour care for disabled patients. The home care workers are right to reject this blackmail. Firstly, this is NYC—the home of Wall Street. There is more than enough money here to ensure that everyone receives free, quality care and that workers are paid enough to live on an 8-hour day. Secondly, the home care agencies and the politicians who administer Medicaid don’t give a damn about the patients and treat the immigrant women who try to care for them like dirt.

The interests of workers and patients are the same: we need to fight the insurance companies, the government, the Democratic Party politicians, and their agents in the leadership of hospital unions. We need a different leadership in the unions that will fight for the workers and against the bosses.

If the Democrats succeed in keeping this exploitation legal, we are all in the firing line. To defend our working conditions in hospitals we have to fight for the home care workers, and by doing this we will be making our unions stronger and better able to fight the attacks coming. We also have to fight so our young people have a future.