This week, scores of activists turned out on the steps of City Hall to support "No More 24!" hunger strikers pressing for a municipal ban on the practice of paying live-in caregivers just 13 hours pay.
"These homecare attendants work 24 hours and go into the homes of the elderly and disabled including overnight shifts to take care of these patients but they are not being paid for 11 hours because these agencies are saying 'you sleep eight hours and three hours for meal breaks'," Lillian Chu, member of Youth Against Sweatshops and the Ain't Am I Woman Coalition, told WBAI.
Chu continued. "Talking to any of these workers, they will tell you they don't sleep the whole time, they are always on the clock, they are at the patient's home--they are never leaving the workplace for two or three consecutive days. Sometimes they have to get up to make sure the patient doesn't get bed sores .....Every little noise they get up to check on them."
According to the 'No More 24' City Council ban sponsor Council Member Chris Marte (D), New York City is the only jurisdiction in the state where such a 'live-in' arrangement shortchanges workers who are immigrant women of color.
"Patients needing 24 hour care deserve shifts like those that exist in every other city in New York State--eight hours--twelve hour shifts, other norms in places where the workforce is white," Marte said when he re-introduced the legislation in 2024. "But here in New York City they are Dominican, Chinese, Puerto Rican and many other immigrant women who are forced to work in inhumane conditions that rob them of their wages."
In our B Block, we got an update on the Upper Eastside Legionnaires outbreak that claimed a seventh life this week from Cameron Clarke, a health, housing, and environmental justice organizer and medical student. Cameron studied health education and biology at Howard University in Washington, DC, and subsequently earned masters degrees in social and public policy from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
In our second hour we heard from Ty Pinkins who is running as an independent for the US Senate in Mississippi on a platform that includes getting corporate PACs out of politics as well as special interest money from groups like AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Pinkins hails from Rolling Fork, in the Mississippi Delta. He is a decorated veteran who served on active duty for 21 years including three combat tours—culminating in over thirty-six months at war. For his actions in combat, he was awarded the Bronze Star.
He served as a former Communications Aide to President Barack Obama, and is author of 23 Miles & Running: My American Journey from Chopping Cotton in the Mississippi Delta to Sleeping in the White House.
As a community organizer and lawyer Pinkins has fought on behalf of families facing eviction at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and helped win millions of dollars in damages for Mississippi workers cheated out of their pay by their employers.
We finished up with an essential conversation with University of Massachusetts Professor Jamie Rowen about how ICE is increasingly using non-law enforcement databases from multiple civilian agencies to target people for arrest and detention on immigration charges.
