We are disabled, crip, mad, debilitated, and disability activists, advocates, scholars, workers, and home care recipients.
We proclaim our full support for the struggle of the home care workers of New York City who are currently engaged in the “No More 24” campaign. We specifically support their immediate demand for enactment of the No More 24 bill (City Council bill, Intro. 303), and we support the broader struggle of the Ain’t I A Woman?! coalition against the hyper-exploitation of home care workers.
Presently, tens of thousands of New York City home care workers are compelled to labor for 24-hour shifts at only 13-hours pay. These workers are predominantly immigrant women of color, subjected to systematic precarity, vulnerability, under-valuation, overwork, debility, and disablement. They have been unfairly made to shoulder the failings of medical insurance, corporate home care, and municipal and state political systems.
Home care workers deserve far better than the intolerable status quo. So, too, do disabled people and other recipients of home care. Disabled people in New York City and nationwide face disproportionately high rates of poverty, houselessness, unemployment, violence, neglect, discrimination, incarceration, and institutionalization. All disabled people deserve to live dignified, autonomous, well-resourced lives as full members of society in their own homes and communities.
While sympathetic to the concerns expressed by some disabled people about the No More 24 bill, we think it is horribly mistaken that some leaders of disability NGOs and legacy advocacy organizations have publicly framed the No More 24 workers’ struggle as counterposed to the interests of the “disability community.” We know well that disabled people have much to lose (and potentially gain) in the outcome of this fight. But we know, too, that the battle lines in this fight are not primarily between disabled people and the home care workers.
We are further disappointed that some supposed allies of disabled people – including the officialdoms of certain unions, and the Democratic Party state governor and city mayor, Kathy Hochul and Zohran Mamdani – have lent their efforts to stymieing or otherwise slow-walking the No More 24 campaign, citing in part their “concern” for the disabled. We reject this as a hollow alibi for refusal to act on the just demands of the home care workers.
In sum, we endorse the home care workers’ demand for an immediate end to 24-hour shifts at 13-hours pay. We further emphasize what to us is an inextricably linked demand, namely, that disabled people should continue to have the option of receiving care in their own homes and communities, with no reduction in the number of care hours received. We view the home care corporations, “managed care” insurers, and city and state government officials – that is, the most powerful entities in this many-sided relationship – as being squarely responsible for effecting this latter demand by way of their access to ample funding sources (this is, after all, the richest city in the richest country in the history of the world).
This is a crisis of the ruling class’s making. It is the fault of neither the exploited home care workers nor the predominantly poor recipients of home care. Consequently, we believe that the joining of the struggles and demands for both workers’ justice and disability justice will strengthen each in a powerful mutualistic coalition. Thus, we appeal to the home care workers, the No More 24 campaign, and the Ain’t I A Woman?! coalition, as well as to all disability advocacy organizations, to explicitly advance our respective interests in tandem. We say: “No More 24!”, “Put People First!”, and “Universal Home Care Access is a Right!”
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Ain’t I A Woman Campaign; modified by Tempest.