Home healthcare aide hunger strike is our fight

As a unionized city hospital doctor, I know the physical toll of shift work. I’ve pulled my share of 24-hour shifts. Like many readers of The Chief, I’ve felt the fog and disorientation at 4 a.m. as an essential worker serving New Yorkers. 

Home-care workers play an essential role in our city’s fragmented health system. They keep elderly and disabled New Yorkers healthy and able to live meaningful lives in their own homes - and out of ambulances and ERs.

When I meet a frail older person requiring urgent surgery for a hip fracture, the home-care worker often accompanies the patient to the hospital, providing essential information based on a trusting, professional relationship.

Home-care workers attend to the basic and intimate needs of the most vulnerable members of our city around the clock; it is back-breaking and emotionally exhausting labor leading to predictable harm when regularly performed for 24 hours straight. 

There is a well-known “dose-response” effect from excessive hours and workplace injuries, cancer, cognitive decline, sleep disorders and a number of other serious health effects. We know chronic sleep deprivation in health workers is bad for the worker, the patient and the system as a whole.

But an unholy alliance of "non-profit" home-care agencies, health insurance giants, corrupt union bosses and politicians benefit from pressuring these workers into 24 hour shifts, not counting 11 of their hours with the excuse that they are for “uninterrupted sleep” and meal breaks. This is wage theft.

Home-care workers employed through the Chinese American Planning Council Home Attendant Program have told me that when they request split 12-hour shifts, their hours are taken away as punishment.

Disgracefully, officials from Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union are working hand-in-glove with health industry lobbyists to cheerlead this arrangement along with the usual suspects of industry-funded think tanks, “patient advocacy” groups funded by dark money, and “progressive” non-profits that union-bust, like the Legal Aid Society.

They are coming out of the woodwork at the behest of Governor Hochul and her donors in the health industry to “kill the bill.”

Their guilt-tripping and bad faith arguments are familiar to any health worker:

“If you don’t work X hours, who else will care for the patient?”

“There’s just no money in the budget for more staff”

“You won’t qualify for health benefits if you don’t work enough hours - don’t you want your family to have healthcare coverage?”

This Thursday April 16 at City Hall, 11 home-care workers will start a hunger strike until No More 24 (Int 303) is passed. Their demands are not radical - an end to 24-hour shifts, splitting them to 12-hour shifts instead - clearly safer for all involved.

Not my fight, you say?

If you want to know why your pay hasn’t kept up with inflation, why you’re working harder for less, and feel demeaned and devalued in your workplace, look closer at how 1199SEIU officials collude with industry lobbyists. All workers suffer when unions are controlled by the boss and big business.

“Labor leaders” now promote 24-hour shifts for low-wage workers as necessary for them to make ends meet, when previous generations shed blood and were imprisoned fighting for an eight hour work day and a living wage.

We’ve seen real wages drop for 40 years under both Democrats and Republicans. But the deeper betrayal we must confront is happening inside unions.

Co-opted labor bureaucrats protecting their benefit fund fiefdoms, holding out for a payout, work to undermine union democracy and member organizing. Former 1199SEIU boss Dennis Rivera’s consulting business now pulls in $300,000 a year from New York’s biggest spending lobbyist for “strategic advice.”

These entrenched officials might send a strongly worded letter when their members are abducted by ICE and sent to El Salvador. They might pound their fists on the table when wages are cut to fund an obscene and illegal war.

But when it comes to acting with resolve? 

At this moment of international crisis, union officials are busy horse-trading with the Democratic Party, cutting side deals with health insurance companies and opposing both No More 24 and the New York Health Act.

A majority of New Yorkers support the New York Health Act. This common-sense piece of legislation would take health benefits off the bargaining table, out of the hands of sold-out union officials, so that healthcare is paid for as a public service for all, like the fire department. This would save billions of dollars for taxpayers and unshackle workers.

It would stop management from holding you and your family’s health hostage, like they are doing to the home-care workers. It would embolden all workers, unionized or not, to demand fair wages and push back against bullies in their workplace and in Washington.

Co-opted union officials are just a fig leaf used by the real enemy: the organized money of the behemoth health insurance industry and their bought politicians. They have learned tricks from the boss to keep us disorganized, scared, and stuck with stagnant wages. They keep us helpless while our tax dollars are diverted from schools and hospitals to fund war, genocide and ICE. 

There is a short-term fix for the home-care crisis: the No More 24 Act. Mayor Mamdani championed it on the campaign trail, Speaker Menin promised to hold a vote, now is the time to demand they pass it.

Our democracy depends on organized workers standing up for ourselves and the people we serve. If management and corrupt union officials keep us subdued by dangling health benefits, the horizon is dark.

It’s time for every rank-and-file member - city workers, nurses, teachers and home-care workers - to demand the New York Health Act.

Let’s take our power back.