For years, New York’s home health aides have been arguing that they have not been fairly compensated for 24-hour shifts. In a landmark decision, an arbitrator ruled Friday that 42 home care staffing agencies must pay $30 million into a “special wage fund” to compensate workers who were underpaid for these shifts and for other assignments dating as far back as 2008.

The award covers more than 100,000 current and former home care workers represented by the union 1199SEIU.

“This is a win for 1199 home care workers and our families, and I am proud to be a part of the fight to make sure 24-hour workers are paid more fairly,” Argelis Sanchez, one of the impacted workers, said in a statement via the union.

Many of the workers’ claims stem from a state policy allowing them to be paid for 13 hours of a 24-hour shift. Under the law, aides are supposed to get eight hours of sleep — at least five of which are uninterrupted — and three hours for meals during each 24-hour shift spent in an elderly or disabled client’s home. But over the past several years, current and former home care workers have filed multiple class-action lawsuits against their employers saying they did not get the requisite sleep and meal time under the law, or the extra pay they were owed as a result.

In 2015, the union 1199 began putting clauses in its collective bargaining agreements with home care employers requiring that wage-and-hour claims be resolved through private arbitration. The union claimed it would...

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