Today NMASS members joined other working women to recognize the leadership of the home attendants who have been fighting to end the inhuman 24-hour workday. Working women stood together to receive an award from New York City Council Member Christopher Marte.

NMASS member Georgina Abreu expressed her excitement and stressed the importance of this recognition of the organized fight. “We will not rest until we have ended the 24-hour workday and gotten our stolen wages.”

Our fight to end the 24-hour workday has garnered national attention in the New York Times in an article by Stefanos Chen on March 7, 2024. NMASS member Valeria Guerrero, 63, a former home care aide from Honduras who worked 24-hour shifts for over 20 years, said she averaged three to four hours of sleep a night. She blames her worsening diabetes on her poor sleep schedule.

At her last assignment in 2022, in a two-story house in the Bronx, she spent four days a week caring for an older woman with limited mobility who used an oxygen tank. When she wasn’t preparing meals, taking the patient to the bathroom or adjusting medical equipment, Ms. Guerrero said, she would sleep on a sofa.

Feeling drowsy one morning, she fell down a flight of stairs and hurt her back and left ankle, she said. Unable to work after the injury and left with little savings, she now lives with her niece in the Bronx. She said she was paid $15 an hour for 12 hours of the day, despite regularly working more.

Now she is seeking payment for thousands of unlogged hours, according to NMASS, a worker organizing group that is helping with her claim. Based on a complaint she submitted to the State Department of Labor, she could be entitled to over $177,000 in unpaid wages and damages.

Ms. Guerrero hopes that a ban on 24-hour shifts could help other home health workers.

“I spent most of my birthdays at work,” she said in Spanish. “You don’t get to have a life.”