DC 37 Leadership Shames the Workers Movement By Supporting the 24-Hour Work Day

Earlier this year I learned about the abusive conditions facing home health aide workers forced to labor 24-hour shifts – without full pay – at the expense of their physical, mental and social health.

While health care workers are exploited and overworked across this city, the forced 24-hour shift is something different: workers are not only overworked but isolated, without support, and paid for only half the hours they are present. Predominantly women and racial minorities, these home health aides are exploited to care for the rest of us – especially our elders, whom as a society we have failed to adequately care for, stuck as we are in an economy designed around corporate and financial wealth extraction.

As a psychologist on a mobile crisis team, I regularly encounter home health aides caring for individuals with multiple complex medical and psychiatric problems, and I see the toll it takes. Those organizing against the 24-hour shift describe physical illness, depression and an inability to maintain family and social life.

Some say they can barely get out of bed. How can anyone provide quality care to vulnerable people while being treated this way?

At a moment when rank-and-file workers might hope to see DC 37 use its significant platform to stand with this grassroots organizing effort, the union has instead added its voice to the reactionary forces in local government and the nonprofit world that are invested in preserving the status quo.

Last week, DC 37 sent an email alert and posted on social media urging members to rally against the homee health aide workers’ organizing – while framing this opposition as being in the aides’ own interest. They are hosting a rally this Wednesday at City Hall Park to protest the very workers they claim to represent.

Their argument is that because the 24-hour shift was part of past collective bargaining agreements, making this practice illegal would void those contracts and cost unionized aides their benefits. But this argument does not hold up.

It would simply mean that unions representing home health aides must return to the table and negotiate a better contract – one that eliminates coerced, unpaid overnight labor and preserves hard-won benefits. That is what unions are currently structured to do.

Instead, DC 37 is asking workers and the public to accept that the price of healthcare coverage is submission to forced 24-hour shifts. That is not a defense of labor – it is a defense of the arrangement that makes cheap care possible at workers’ expense.

Notably, DC 37 takes a similar position against the New York Health Act (NYHA), which would guarantee healthcare for all New Yorkers and take health benefits off the bargaining table entirely. If the NYHA passed, no health aid worker, no worker period – union or not – would face the threat of losing healthcare coverage as leverage in contract negotiations.

It would give unions more power to fight for real improvements in working conditions. DC 37’s opposition to the NYHA, like its opposition to the home health aides, ultimately protects the tools used to discipline workers rather than the workers themselves.

DC 37’s vocal stand against ending 24-hour shifts, is also a story about internal union democracy. Rank- and-file DC 37 members were not consulted about whether to oppose the home aide workers’ organizing.

Recently the union has also rushed through changes to member healthcare and data sharing arrangements with no input from the membership. No one asked us because no one would support what they are doing.

Unions historically won the eight-hour workday – now DC 37 executive leadership is campaigning, without member input, to preserve 24-hour shifts and unpaid hours. At the same time, DC 37 is silent on the current LIRR strike, where workers are fighting for wages that keep pace with inflation.

Cross-union solidarity and amplification of labor struggles across sectors should be exactly what a union federation of DC 37’s size is built for. The question worth asking is whether the current DC 37 executive leadership is oriented toward advancing workers’ freedom and power – or toward maintaining its own position within a work order that grows more authoritarian by the year.

DC 37 is hosting its rally this Wednesday, May 20 at 12 pm, at City Hall Park at the intersection of Broadway and Murray. The home health aide workers who are organizing against the 24-hour shift will be there too – and they are asking DC 37 members and labor movement allies to stand with them.

Now is the time for solidarity, for bold demands, and for a city that guarantees quality care and real democratic power in the workplace.