Three years ago, my friend Vittoria Fariello approached me. She wanted to tell me about a bill she was advocating for. She knew I was generally inclined to support labor issues, civil rights, and human rights. She told me the bill introduced by Council Member Christopher Marte, would make it illegal for home-care attendants to be forced to work 24-hour shifts while being paid for only 13 hours.
My response, rather than the expected, civilized, yes, of course, where do I sign, was more incredulous.
Wait. What? But that is already illegal. Surely, it has to be.
This is New York City. We have laws. We have agencies. We have hearings, commissions, task forces, advisory boards, blue-ribbon panels, and elected officials who can say “dignity” three times in one sentence without visible injury.
Surely, forcing someone to work a 24-hour shift and paying them for barely half of it would already be forbidden and therefore there would be no need for a specific law.
That would be wage theft. It would be labor abuse. It would be a human rights violation. It would belong before the U.N. Human Rights Council. In moral terms, it would come perilously close to involuntary servitude outfitted in Medicaid paperwork.
And surely, surely, that had been outlawed in our great, progressive, civically minded New York City a long time ago.
Then Vittoria showed me the evidence. And I was shocked.
Because it turns out that in our beloved city, our city of tenant protections, labor history, immigrant struggle, righteous proclamations, and elected officials who can locate a picket line with the precision of a watch maker, the (mostly) women who care for our loved ones when they become sick, old, frail, disabled, or unable to live without help may still be assigned to work 24-hour shifts and paid for only 13 hours.
The remaining 11 hours are treated as if they belong to no one. Not to the worker. Not to the law. Certainly not to the conscience of the city.
The theory, we are told, is that the home-care aides are not really working during those unpaid hours. They are supposedly eating. Or maybe they are sleeping. Or likely they are resting.
Anyone who has ever cared for a sick parent, a disabled spouse, an aging neighbor, or a frightened patient at night knows the absurdity of that fiction. Care does not obey office hours. Dementia does not pause graciously for a meal break. A frail person does not fall only during compensated time. A patient who needs hygiene, lifting, medication reminders, cleaning, repositioning, feeding, or reassurance does not consult the payroll structure before needing help.
And yet the system pretends otherwise.
It has created a metaphysical worker: present enough to be responsible, but absent enough not to be paid. Awake enough to respond, but asleep enough to disappear from the timesheet.
Schrödinger’s Cat theory applied to home-care aide law. In the box, she is both working and not working. But unlike Schrödinger’s cat, she does not have the luxury of being hypothetical.
She is a real woman. Often an immigrant woman. Often a woman of color. Often a woman doing intimate, exhausting, back-breaking essential work that allows someone else’s mother, father, spouse, or child to remain at home.
“This is New York City. We have laws. We have agencies. We have hearings, commissions, task forces, advisory boards, blue-ribbon panels, and elected officials who can say “dignity” three times in one sentence without visible injury.
Surely, forcing someone to work a 24-hour shift and paying them for barely half of it would already be forbidden and therefore there would be no need for a specific law.”
And the struggle to end this outrageous arrangement has itself become exhausting.
Hunger strike
In 2024, home-care attendants went on a hunger strike outside City Hall to demand an end to 24-hour shifts. This year, they did it again. In April 2026, elderly immigrant home-care workers camped outside City Hall and began another hunger strike to push the City Council to bring the No More 24 Act to a vote. Reporting described about 15 elderly immigrant home-care workers refusing food as they demanded action on the bill.
Pause for a moment on the insanity of that sentence.
In New York City, in the year 2026, elderly immigrant women had to stop eating to ask the government to stop allowing 24-hour workdays paid as 13-hour workdays.
What archaic corner of the world requires so much advocacy to abolish practices that are cruel, degrading, and built on wage theft? What supposedly civilized city requires hunger strikes to persuade lawmakers that women should not be worked around the clock and paid for half the day?
Hunger strikes are the language of desperation. They are what people do when ordinary democratic channels have failed them. They belong, we imagine, to prisons, dictatorships, colonial regimes, and places where human rights are not commemorated at gala dinners.
They are not supposed to be necessary in progressive New York City.
And yet here we are.
This should shame us. Not mildly. Not decorously. Not in the careful way institutions express concern while appointing a working group. It should shame us deeply.
There will, of course, be objections. There always are.
We will be told the system is complicated. Medicaid is complicated. Managed long-term care is complicated. Staffing is complicated. Reimbursement is complicated. Jurisdiction is complicated.
The state, the city, the agencies, the insurers, the providers? All complicated.
Yes. It is complicated.
But complexity is not a moral alibi.
New York has a remarkable ability to solve complicated problems when the beneficiary has a lobbyist, a land-use lawyer, and a rendering with trees on the roof. Suddenly complexity becomes flexibility. Obstacles become opportunities. Public subsidies become tools. Zoning becomes innovation. Rules become pathways.
But when a home-care worker asks not to be kept on duty for 24 hours and paid for 13, we are told to admire and bow to the complexity.
In Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, the West Village, Penn South, Westbeth, Manhattan Plaza, Fulton, Elliott-Chelsea, everywhere around us, care work is part of the hidden infrastructure of daily life.
We see the scaffoldings. We see the bike lanes. We see the land-use notices taped to lampposts in tiny print.
But we do not see the woman leaving an apartment after a 24-hour shift, sleep-deprived, underpaid, rendered invisible, and carrying in her own body the cost of a system that has decided her fatigue is fiscally expedient.
The No More 24 bill asks us to see what has been carefully hidden: that the care economy cannot be built on unpaid labor, sleepless nights, and the moral expectation that women, especially immigrant women, will endure what polite society would never accept for itself.
Imagine proposing this arrangement in another profession. The outrage would be immediate.
The bill’s opponents are warning seniors and disabled that they would be hurt by the legislation, as if fair pay came with side effects. The question before us is not whether we value seniors and disabled New Yorkers. We do. Deeply. The question is whether we are willing to fund and structure care honestly, or whether we will continue pretending that compassion can be delivered by an exhausted woman whose own humanity has been discounted by 11 hours.
No More 24 is not about denying care. Quite the opposite. It is about refusing to define care so cynically that the person giving it is destroyed in the process.
New York City is the only part of the state that allows this kind of work schedule, as if the city was still in a time zone of its own, one century back. In other New York counties, Nassau, Rockland or far away Oswego, home care attendants work shorter shifts and are typically paid for every hour worked. It demonstrates, if there was even a need to demonstrate that fair pay is possible, that NYC is abusing its power, on the back of its workers.
Seeing the bill move through the legislative process has been quite astonishing. While bills updating the building code, or requiring to create task force, have been quick to pass, the No More 24 legislation has sluggishly languished in the City Council pipeline.
Under Adrienne Adams’ speakership, the bill was blocked entirely. Since her successor Julin Menin took office this year, the bill was scheduled for a committee hearing and has been moving through the pipeline. It appears that the Governor’s and the Mayor’s desks may be the next bottleneck. Although Zohran Mamdani promised during his campaign to put an end to the 24-hour work shift, it has been reported that he is now less trepidatious about affixing his signature to the text.
A humane system cannot be built on the inhuman treatment of workers. A city that depends on sleepless women to keep its loved ones safe, and then refuses to pay them for the full measure of that labor, is not being compassionate. It is being cheap.
