This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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The violence of the 24-hour workday: fighting racism by fighting exploitation

By:   []

Date: 2021-09

On the morning of 28 April, dozens of home attendants gathered outside the New York City headquarters of their employer, the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC), to sound the alarm. CPC is one of the largest Asian American social service non-profits in the United States. Among its many activities it runs a home attendant agency, CPCHAP, whose workers provide in-home care for elderly and disabled Medicaid recipients with severe illnesses. These carers do the difficult work of looking after elderly and disabled people in New York City’s Asian community – going to their homes to help feed and bathe them, taking them to appointments, and doing whatever else is needed so that they can live their lives in their own homes. For those who require around-the-clock care, home attendants must get up at night to turn them in bed or to assist them in using the bathroom. CPCHAP employs thousands of homecare workers, the majority of whom are older immigrant women of colour, nearly all Chinese.

In light of the recent wave of anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States, CPC had distributed hand-held alarms to parts of the Asian/Asian American community to use if they felt threatened with violence. On the morning of 28 April, however, CPC homecare workers, along with supporters from across New York City, used the alarms to draw attention to a form of violence that their bosses had been meting out for decades: the 24-hour workday.

How can CPC claim to be against anti-Asian violence, the workers demanded to know, if CPC forces them to work 24-hour shifts? If Chinese workers are abused by their Chinese bosses, how can they ever expect to be respected as human beings? As the alarms rang, the workers called for a boycott of CPC to force the non-profit to meet their demands: an immediate end to 24-hour shifts by splitting them into two 12-hour shifts worked by two different workers, payment for missing wages, and a public apology for the violence CPC had perpetrated against them. Months have passed since the start of the boycott, yet CPC still refuses to meet any of the workers’ demands.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/the-violence-of-the-24-hour-workday-fighting-racism-by-fighting-exploitation/
[2] url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

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