For 11 years, Epifania Hichez worked 24-hour shifts caring for elderly New Yorkers in their homes, while getting paid for only 13 hours of each shift — a state-sanctioned policy that home health workers have fought in the past, and which the New York Court of Appeals upheld in 2019. Now retired, the 73-year-old has become a leading voice in the fight to end 24-hour shifts altogether.
Working 24-hour shifts “destroys our health and kills us slowly,” Hichez said in Spanish during a home care worker rally in Flushing, Queens on Wednesday. “Our family suffers too.”
Often workers are assigned to multiple 24-hour shifts in a row, keeping them away from their families for days at a time. Hichez said she supports a bill in Albany that would split all 24-hour home care shifts in two, with workers getting paid for every hour on the job.
“We’re here to get justice,” she said, “so the women that are working now don’t get hurt the way I got hurt.”
For home health aides, the fight to end 24-hour shifts — or at least get paid for all the hours they work — has been a long and arduous one that has faced many obstacles. Under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the state labor and health departments actively worked to maintain the status quo of paying these workers — most of whom are immigrant women — for about half the hours they’re in their clients’ homes. The 13-hour policy is based on the assumption that workers are able to get three hours for meals each day and eight hours of sleep each night,...
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