No More 24 is a Battle for Democracy
"Unless you do everything for liberty, you have done nothing. There are no two ways of being free: one must be entirely free, or become a slave once more"
The Marxist Unity Group stands in full solidarity with the No More 24 movement and the courageous home attendants going on a hunger strike in front of City Hall. Home attendants are starving themselves to force the city to witness the daily violence the state inflicts on them through grueling 24-hour workdays. They will not end their hunger strike until City Council Speaker Julie Menin brings the No More 24 bill (Intro. 303) up for a vote. Intro 303 would prohibit employers from assigning home attendants a shift longer than 12 hours, ending the torturous 24-hour shift for exploited women of color home care workers in NYC.
As socialists, we demand the abolition of the modern-day plantation embodied in 24-hour workdays and an immigration system that has created an underclass of workers disenfranchised and exploited for superprofits within the borders of the imperial police state. We recognize that there can be no democracy if there is a layer of the working class that is excluded from citizenship, labor law, and made invisible by a racist and patriarchal society that destroys women's bodies for the profits of health insurers. The 24-hour workday embodies the authoritarian structures pitting workers against each other in a race to the bottom.
There have been many misleading statements by home care employers, such as the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC). Opponents of the bill claim that if passed, patients will lose their home care, that home care is solely a state issue, and that the real problem is funding. These claims are baseless. Large home care agencies, like CPC, are crying poor, while they publicly brag about their multi-million dollar budget and construct a luxury tower in Chinatown. Every other town and city in the state of New York has split shifts. Only New York City has 24-hour workdays, and even non-union home care agencies in the city have already switched to split shifts without patients losing access.
The unacknowledged reason NYC-DSA chapter leadership and some of our SIOs are silent or flipped their position on No More 24 (including Zohran Mamdani’s silence on the hunger strike) is to please progressive non-profits and trade union leadership, particularly 1199, who had previously negotiated a settlement with CPC, offering only pennies in turn for not contesting 24-hour workdays and the $90 million in stolen wages.
At the end of the day, the debate about funding is a deliberate diversion from the real question: whether socialists can justify the existence of any system that depends on slavery and superexploitation. The obvious answer is a vehement no. Just as the slaves in Haiti forced the Jacobins to decide if the rights of man are universal or conditional on an alliance with plantation owners, DSA members must decide if abandoning the struggles of immigrant women, forced by their employers to stay awake for three consecutive 24-hour shifts, can be justified to maintain ties with non-profits and the trade union bureaucracy.
The Marxist Unity Group is committed to building DSA into an independent socialist party that can effectively fight for all people exploited and oppressed by capitalism and the imperial police state; a party that does not bend to the will of the Democratic Party or its allies that routinely sell out our immigrant, Black, brown, and superexploited brothers and sisters. In DSA, we have a duty to fight for the liberation of all people, even when it puts us at odds with liberal allies. We will only become the party of the masses if we stand in integrity with them.
We call on NYC-DSA to pass the No More 24 resolution, publicly affirm support for banning 24-hour workdays, for all our CSIOs to sign on to Intro. 303, and for the chapter to pressure Julie Menin to stop blocking passage of the bill.
