The Fight for Free Time Is a Feminist Issue
Thousands of home care workers in New York are forced to work twenty-four-hour shifts while being paid for only half the time. That’s outrageous — and on International Women’s Day, we should heed their call in taking up the struggle for control over our time.
Health care worker during the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
For the last sixteen years, Edith Guttierez has regularly worked twenty-four-hour shifts as a home care worker in New York City — but she’s only paid for half of that time.
And she’s not alone. About 8 percent of New York State’s 240,000 home care workers are assigned twenty-four-hour shifts, many of them consecutive back-to-back shifts. Rest is intermittent, and real sleep is near impossible. The workers, almost all women of color and immigrants, are responsible for the health and safety of those needing round-the-clock care.
That this kind of time and wage theft is allowed to continue — and has actually increased during the pandemic — is a testament to the decrepit state of US labor law. But it also reflects an unfortunate cultural truism. The work of caregiving is invaluable — and so we simply do not value it at all.
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