Home health providers protest 24-hour shifts after ‘insulting’ settlement reached
Lai Yee Chan, a home attendant who worked 24-hour shifts in New York City providing health-related personal care, said she received a $200 check in late 2014
Lai Yee Chan, a home attendant who worked 24-hour shifts in New York City providing health-related personal care, said she received a $200 check in late 2014 for roughly 6,000 overtime hours.
Chan said she viewed the issue as a case of wage theft and rallied other home attendants and filed a class-action lawsuit in 2015 against her employer. Now, years later, workers and advocates are speaking out and protesting in Chinatown in response to what they say is an “insulting” settlement deal.
Chan, who works for the Chinese-American Planning Council, saw her organizing set off years of legal battles and grassroots organizing. It culminated in a $30 million settlement in March between 1199 Service Employees International Union, the health care union representing more than 100,000 home attendants in the city, and 42 home care agencies.
Divided evenly among all the workers, the settlement would give $250 — only $50 more than Chan originally received — to each person, or less than two days of back pay for a 24-hour shift worker, according to the Ain’t I a Woman Campaign, a women-led national outreach effort to end sweatshop conditions.
The union said only 5% to 7% of the home health aides it represents work 24-hour shifts, so workers like Chan will receive significantly more than $250. But even if the $30 million compensation fund were split among those who worked 24 hours, according to estimations from “Ain’t I a Woman," each person would still receive less than $4,000 — a sliver of the total overtime Chan is owed.
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