Gui Zhu Chen has spent years caring for strangers in their homes, working shifts that stretched past 90 hours without sleep or a proper meal. Now 69, she says her body has paid the price for work the state never fully paid for.
“My whole body is falling apart,” Chen said through an interpreter. “It’s just not fair. We demand the governor enforce labor law and pay our stolen wages.”
Chen is one of more than 100 home care aides whose cases were quietly reopened in January by state Supreme Court Judge Daniel C. Lynch. His order found merit in workers’ claims that the New York State Department of Labor abandoned its legal obligations when it dropped its investigation into more than two dozen home care agencies. Chen had filed formal complaints with the labor department back in 2018. Three years ago, the agency closed the probe without explanation. A 2023 lawsuit filed on her behalf claims she is owed approximately $171,000 in unpaid wages.
The state labor department declined to comment on Lynch’s order, citing the ongoing litigation.
At the center of the fight is a New York rule that allows 24-hour home care workers to be paid for only 13 hours of a 24-hour shift, provided workers receive three hours of meal breaks and at least five uninterrupted hours of sleep. Workers and their attorneys say those conditions rarely exist in reality. Aides routinely work up to 96 consecutive hours with no rest, and get paid for a fraction of what they actually work.
The department had argued that mandatory arbitration clauses in the home care agencies’ union contracts barred the state from investigating wage and hour disputes. Lynch rejected that reasoning.
Richard Blum, a labor attorney with the Legal Aid Society, which represents the aides in the case against the state, did not mince words. “I would like to think that the state of New York wants to see its laws enforced, and particularly labor laws protecting the most vulnerable workers in our society, who are doing some of the most valuable and difficult work,” Blum told THE CITY. “And yet, the state has worked vigorously to avoid doing just that.”
The workers fighting these cases are overwhelmingly immigrant women. Advocates have described the 13-hour pay rule as a form of racially coded exploitation, a policy that survives precisely because the people most harmed by it have the least political power. Chen’s fellow aide Lai Yee Chan said she, too, was pushed into early retirement by the physical toll of the work.
Lynch’s ruling is the latest development in a decade-long legal and political fight over whether New York will require full wages for full hours worked. Progress has been slow.
City Council Member Christopher Marte, who represents Chinatown and Lower Manhattan, reintroduced legislation last month that would cap home care shifts at 12 hours per day, or no more than 56 hours per week, unless workers receive at least two weeks’ notice from their employer. He first introduced a version of the bill in 2022. It never made it out of the Council’s labor committee.
Opponents of full 24-hour pay argue that requiring it would significantly drive up costs for a state health care system already under serious fiscal pressure and could reduce access to care for patients who depend on round-the-clock aides to remain in their homes. Those are real concerns, and they deserve a real answer. But the current system answers them by shifting the cost directly onto the workers themselves, in unpaid hours and broken bodies.
Chen’s case, and the more than 100 others Judge Lynch reopened, represent something worth watching closely. A state labor department that spent years ducking its own enforcement responsibilities is now back in court. That alone is meaningful.
For Chen and her colleagues, the stakes are not abstract. They are measured in wages they worked for and never received, and in the physical cost of labor the state has long refused to fully recognize. Lynch’s ruling does not guarantee them anything yet. But it puts the state back in the room where it was always supposed to be.
