The fight over the 24-hour workday, which has spent the last four months parked outside City Hall, moved uptown this week and landed on the Council Speaker’s doorstep.
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A group of home attendants — most of them older immigrant women, several of them using canes — began a two-week sit-in Tuesday morning on the sidewalk outside 20 East End Avenue (between 80th and 81st streets), the Yorkville condominium building that organizers identify as the home of City Council Speaker Julie Menin. They plan to return from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. on July 16, 17, 20, 21, 23 and 24, and they have one demand: that Menin put the original version of the No More 24 Act on the floor for a vote.The bill, Intro 303, was introduced in January by Council Member Christopher Marte and would bar home care employers from assigning any shift longer than 12 hours, cap the workweek at 56 hours, and let the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection investigate and fine violators. Under current state law, an agency can send a single aide into a patient’s apartment for a full 24 hours and pay for only 13 of them, writing off the remaining hours as sleep and meal breaks. Workers say those breaks are fiction — that patients need turning, toileting and medication through the night, and that the hours simply go unpaid.
“I suffer from neurasthenia and leg weakness, have shoulder pain and wake up every night at 3 a.m. even when I’m not working,” said Xiulan Zhu, who worked 24-hour shifts for 12 years. “Greedy insurance companies and home care agencies not only deny real 24-hour care for patients, but also slowly murder us by destroying our health.”
Flora Rosas, who did the shifts for 13 years, said she is now disabled. “I injured my spine after falling while working because I was too exhausted,” she said. “Now I can’t sleep and walk because of the pain.”
The escalation to Menin’s block follows a March sit-in outside City Hall and an April hunger strike by roughly 15 elderly workers, which ended after six days when Menin appeared and pledged to bring the bill forward. Workers understood that to mean a vote in April, on the bill as written. Neither happened. A spokesperson later said the Speaker never promised the bill’s language would survive untouched, because that is not how the legislative process works.
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What did emerge, on the night of May 5, was an amended Intro 303-B — and it is the amendments, more than the delay, that have workers on East End Avenue this week. The rewritten bill exempts home care workers covered by a union contract that was in effect as of Feb. 18, 2026, meaning the 12-hour cap would not apply to them until that contract expires. It also lets employers assign shifts beyond 12 hours through Oct. 1, 2027, if a worker agrees in writing, lets workers opt past the 56-hour weekly limit indefinitely, and raises the maximum penalty from $500 to $2,500.To the sit-in’s organizers, the union carve-out is the betrayal. “We met with senior members of Menin’s staff in April when workers were on their hunger strike, and they told us face to face that the Speaker was committed to the language of the bill and to submitting it as is,” said Kim Beck of Downtown Nasty Women, part of the Ain’t I A Woman Coalition. “What we didn’t expect was that she would try to change the bill and cut out the unionized workers. That is betrayal.”
Gibb Surette, vice president of the National Organization of Legal Services Workers, UAW Local 2320, went further: “Julie Menin proposed to deny unionized workers the protections of the No More 24 Act, even if those protections are extended to others. On top of violating human rights, Menin is illegally discriminating against union workers on a scale which I have seldom if ever seen.”
In April, the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls — writing with four other independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council — sent a letter to the U.S. State Department warning that the city’s 24-hour home care shifts appear to meet indicators of forced labor and to violate the human rights of the migrant women who overwhelmingly perform them. The letter, made public 60 days after it was issued, said workers’ complaints had been systematically ignored.
A spokesperson for the City Council said Menin’s position has not changed. “Speaker Menin has long fought for stronger worker protections and remains focused on phasing out the 24-hour workday, an outdated practice that places workers under extreme physical and emotional strain,” the spokesperson said. “There is more work to be done and she encourages all stakeholders to come to the table to help identify a viable and sustainable path forward.”
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That “viable path” is the crux of the fight, and it is why the bill has been shedding co-sponsors rather than gaining them. The Legal Aid Society, the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled and other disability groups have urged the Council not to pass Intro 303 as written, arguing that some patients would lose coverage and some workers would lose jobs. Their central objection is jurisdictional: 24-hour live-in care is authorized and funded through state Medicaid, not the city, and agencies cannot unilaterally convert a live-in authorization into two 12-hour shifts unless the insurance plan approves it — leaving providers to choose between violating city law and violating their state contracts. At least five Council members have withdrawn their support since April.Those advocates have their own testimony to point to. At a May hearing, disabled New Yorkers said they feared being pushed into nursing homes if agencies could no longer staff round-the-clock care. Joseph Rappaport, executive director of the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled, called the bill flawed and warned that if it passed as written, people with disabilities would lose their coverage.
Menin’s office has cast the amendments workers are protesting as a response to exactly that problem. The one-year delay and the opt-in provisions, in this telling, are meant to buy time for the state to fund split shifts rather than impose an unfunded mandate overnight — and the funding gap is real enough that even the bill’s own sponsor conceded ground on it. Marte agreed to push the effective date to April 2027 to give the state time to obtain Medicaid funding. Nor is organized labor uniformly behind the original text: 1199SEIU, which represents a large share of the city’s home care workforce, has said it backs abolishing the 24-hour shift only if every hour is fully funded, so that vulnerable New Yorkers do not lose access to care in the process.
Supporters call that a false choice, arguing a workforce being physically broken cannot deliver good care in the first place. “A system that breaks the bodies of caregivers can never provide adequate care to those in need,” said Lucy Zhang, a licensed mental health counselor.
Menin has not set a date for a vote. Workers have said that if she does not act, they will begin a second hunger strike outside City Hall on July 28.
“Speaker Menin, shame on you,” said home attendant Raulina Duran. “You have the power to end the torture.”
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