Xiulan Zhu worked 24-hour shifts as a home attendant for 12 years. She says she now suffers from neurasthenia and leg weakness, shoulder pain, and wakes up every night at 3 a.m., even when she isn’t working.
“24-hour shifts are torture,” Zhu said. “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. Is it because we are immigrant women of color?”
On Tuesday, Zhu and dozens of other home care workers began a two-week sit-in outside City Council Speaker Julie Menin’s (D-Manhattan) Upper East Side home—the most direct escalation yet in a fight that has stretched more than a decade, and the latest response to a Council Speaker workers say has broken her word to them three times over.
Demonstrators plan to return to Menin’s block from 9 to 11 a.m. on July 16, 17, 20, 21, 23, and 24.
In response to Courier New York’s request for comment, a City Council spokesperson said: “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Menin has long fought for stronger worker protections and remains focused on phasing out the 24-hour workday, an outdated practice that places workers under extreme physical and emotional strain. 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.”
The statement did not address the workers’ specific claims: that Menin promised in March to pass the original bill without changes, that her office later submitted versions reframing 24-hour shifts as a permanent opt-in and exempting unionized workers, or that the bill’s effective date was pushed back six months.
The United Nations has declared New York City’s 24-hour home care shift system a form of torture and a violation of international human rights law.
Three broken promises
Intro. 303, or the No More 24 Act, would cap home care shifts at 12 hours. The bill stalled in March after Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D) administration pushed for an opt-in workaround and Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) threatened to pull Medicaid funding.
Menin made her own commitment separately: to bring the original bill to a vote unchanged. She pledged that publicly March 19 and again directly to the coalition on April 22—amid a weeklong hunger strike by 15 elderly immigrant women outside City Hall—promising to submit it by mid-May. Workers paused their strike on the strength of that promise.
“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, an Ain’t I a Woman!? member organization. “What we didn’t expect was that she would try to change the bill and cut out the unionized workers. That is betrayal.”
Instead, on May 6, Menin’s office submitted a modified bill reframing the 24-hour shift as something a worker could “voluntarily” opt into. It also struck the Oct. 1, 2027, sunset date on that provision, making the exception permanent. On June 2, another version exempted unionized home attendants from the bill’s protections entirely, meaning organized workers could still be assigned 24-hour shifts even as nonunion workers gained new limits. The effective date was also pushed back six months, to October 2027.
Menin’s promised May 14 vote never happened.
‘A violation of the National Labor Relations Act’
Gibb Surette, retired members vice president of the National Organization of Legal Services Workers, UAW Local 2320, called the union carve-out illegal.
“Julie Menin has already proposed that the protections of No More 24, if they are extended to anyone, should still be denied to any worker who is unionized,” Surette said at the sit-in. “That is retaliation for concerted activity—a violation of the National Labor Relations Act on a scale which I have seldom, if ever, seen.”
Lucy Zhang, a licensed mental health counselor, tied the fight to patient care: “A system that breaks the bodies of caregivers can never provide adequate care to those in need.”
Where it stands
Workers say the sit-in follows a June 24 coalition letter warning Menin that continued inaction would leave them “no choice but to resume the hunger strike,” and a July 1 press conference where organizers promised “an important announcement” on next steps. That announcement arrived July 13, in the form of the sit-in.
“This hurts patients, too, because we cannot provide the care they deserve,” said Raulina Duran, one of the home attendants outside Menin’s home this week. “You have the power to end the torture.”
