NEW YORK CITY — Home care workers with the Ain't I a Woman?! coalition announced Friday that they will begin another hunger strike outside New York City Hall to press the city council to vote on the No More 24 Act. The bill would require home care agencies to split overnight assignments into two 12-hour shifts and cap a worker's weekly hours at 56.

Fifteen home health workers camped outside City Hall for six days the previous month, refusing to eat until they secured a promise that the council would vote on legislation ending mandatory 24-hour workdays. A month later, the council has not voted on the bill.

"We are very confident that our movement is getting bigger and there will be more pressure to do the right thing," said Zishun Ning, an organizer with the Chinese Staff and Workers Association. During a sit-in at City Hall, a representative from the mayor's office conveyed that the mayor needed to consider workers who wanted 24-hour shifts. "People felt very angry," Ning said.

Under current New York labor law, agencies that assign workers to 24-hour live-in shifts are required to pay them for only 13 hours, classifying the remaining 11 hours as designated sleep and meal time. The No More 24 Act, introduced in 2022, would also impose municipal fines on agencies that retaliate against workers who refuse 24-hour shifts.

"This is the only industry that allows people to work for 24 hours and only get 13 hours of pay. A lot of times it's 23 days in a row where people have to leave their homes and stay and sleep and eat where they work," said city council member Christopher Marte. "Many of these workers have been threatened by their home care agencies that they will lose their jobs," Marte said.

Home care is a $13bn industry in New York. Two-thirds of the state's home health care workers are immigrants who rely on the jobs for income and health coverage.

Since 2015, the Ain't I a Woman?! coalition has organized through hunger strikes, lawsuits and legislation. Workers and advocates began filing wage-theft lawsuits in 2011, and a Department of Labor rule extending minimum wage and overtime protections to home care workers took effect in 2015. Coalition members accuse the Chinese-American Planning Council of withholding $90m in wages.

The No More 24 Act has 16 co-sponsors on the city council, 10 short of the 26 needed to pass. The Legal Aid Society and the Center for Independence of the Disabled New York oppose the bill, arguing that splitting a 24-hour shift into two 12-hour shifts doubles the number of workers required per household and that the supply of workers is insufficient.

After last month's hunger strike, the coalition secured a commitment from city council speaker Julie Menin to bring the updated bill to a vote in May. Menin's office denied making an absolute guarantee on the vote date but said the bill had been substantially updated with stakeholder feedback.

Caixiong Liu, 69, spent 18 years in home care and joined the movement in 2022. She said the work caused her chronic back pain, insomnia and memory loss due to years without uninterrupted sleep. "I don't want the next generation of workers to go through what I did," Liu said.