The homecare industry: wage slavery

    “I spend my life in someone else’s home, shunned from family and my life. I work day and night, 24 hours at work without rest. My body aches all over, my nerves have been damaged.” These jarring words are one of the many vivid snapshots from the film “The 24 Hour Workday,” a grassroots documentary that exposes the level of hyper-exploitation suffered by women workers in the home care industry. Divorced from the film’s context, these words sound like they came from the pages of a history book about Black women workers living in bondage up until the 19th century, many of whom raised the slaveowners’ children, losing their own. After organizing with homecare workers, I think this should be rightfully called out as modern-day wage slavery. The homecare industry still retains much of the racist and sexist essence it did in the past.
Women—predominately immigrants, Black, Latin, and Asian—make up 93 percent of the labor force in the homecare industry. The homecare workers who star in the film reflect this statistic. They’re mostly immigrants from Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and China, who came here in order to escape poverty or violence, to give their families a better hope for the future.
Ironically, once they became homecare workers, many discovered they weren’t not much better off. Many reported they started neglecting their families once they began working 24-hour shifts. They described taking on such grueling work out of necessity and the scarcity of opportunities, others found themselves coerced by agencies to take on 24-hour shifts as 12- and 8-hour shifts became less available. Homecare workers call this good work, but describe the working conditions as a prison from which they can’t escape
Most of the stories we hear in the film, or in our organizing with them, have a theme of loss. Some have lost their children to violence and drugs on the streets of New York, others in Honduras. Or they miss out on important milestones in their families. Some say the long hours destroyed their marriages or relationships with their children.
Above all, the most profound loss homecare workers face is the destruction of their health. Homecare workers account for some of the highest rates of disability in the workforce, second only to construction workers. Many become patients as a result of working long hours. As is the case of one worker in the film who is barely 50, uses a walker, and now needs a homecare worker.
Throughout the film, home attendants have accurately appraised the situation, and called it out as slavery. Aside from being forced to do double, sometimes triple, the work for half the pay, many have been fired for asking for less hours.
The agency bosses make these workers agree to shady contractual agreements that hold them legally responsible if something happens to the patient on their watch.This forces them to stay awake, so their patient doesn’t die on their watch. Crooked agencies have also gone as far as intimidating undocumented homecare workers with threats of deportation.
 This level of exploitation is legal, just as it was in the past.The state plantation sponsor, otherwise known as the New York State Department of Labor, has long justified this practice through the 13-hour rule (where the homecare workers are paid wages for 13 hours for 24 hours work, thus robbed of 11 hours pay), and is doing everything in its power to block home attendants from fighting back.
But while the state cries crocodile tears over this bit of thievery on the part of the homecare bosses, they continuosly pit workers against their patients, while insurance companies rake in massive profits. The bosses rationale for justifying the 13 hour rule is to save agencies from imminent “financial ruin, but these arguments sound sickeningly familiar, to the ones plantation bosses used to preserve the violence of slavery in the past.Yet this entire country was built on slavery.Truly the bosses have no interest in entirely abolishing it.
 Despite these concrete examples of this partiuclarly disgusting form of wage slavery, many workers outside the campaign have objected to workers referring to it as modern day slavery. Many, parroting the bosses’ line, say it’s an exaggeration, that home attendants have a choice in the matter, and can quit.That in order for it to be slavery you need an auction block, or  shackles or physical violence to keep them in bondage.
These objections are in part due to the capitalist lie that we get a fair exchange for our labor—a fair day’s wage for our work. But the truth is that we are all wage slaves.
However the bosses use insidious means to cover it up. Through  their laws,courts, and cultural brainwashing, the bosses have long been appropriating our labor, robbing us of our time, families, homes, and lives. They also reinforce this with brutal impunity, using their cops, military, and other forms of terror to suppress us and keep us in line, so we won’t fight back. Nevertheless homecare workers continue to fight back. Still workers rise!