As I approached City Hall on April 10th to attend a No More 24 protest, I saw a sign that read “stop wasting our lives”. Women took the stage, one by one, giving testimony about their abuse in our healthcare system. These home aid sweatshops target immigrants, many of whom are immigrant women of color, to provide 24-hour care to disabled New Yorkers. It wasn’t until later that I found out that workers must work 24-hour shifts, only 13 hours of which are paid. But the resounding message is much broader. This isn’t just about back pay for stolen wages or better pay. It is about the right to say no, to say: “stop wasting our lives”. I watched my own parents work to provide a better future for me, breaking bones and working multiple shifts, leaving them largely immobile, I see my own past and the history of the colonial/modern gender system reproduce itself.

One of the many arguments made against their demand is that those with disabilities will effectively be put in danger after the Medicaid program, which is underfunded, will be rendered unable to serve precarious communities. They argue, “We cannot risk Medicaid collapsing”. But that’s a pretty narrow definition of disability and risk.

The No More 24 hunger strikes did not simply arise from regulatory failure, but from a broader reorganization of responsibility for care by neoliberalism. The state has not only privatized the costs of social reproduction through insurance companies and home care sweatshops, but also shifted the risk of disability onto families, who are forced to absorb the shocks produced by capitalism. Dependency is thus managed privately rather than collectively, and when these mechanisms of individual market-mediated access fail, and families fall short, the gap is filled through intensified reliance on unpaid or underpaid domestic labor by women.

This arrangement and allegiance to capital are reinforced across political lines, as seen in the unwillingness of Julie Menin, Kathy Hochul, and Zohran Mamdani to support the No More 24 Act. This is because the dissolution of the welfare state is a project of both neoliberalism and social conservatism. Efforts to limit public expenditure coexist with commitments to the nuclear family as the primary site of care and social reproduction. Even negotiated reforms, such as promises to compensate home care workers for the full 24-hours, often preserve the centrality of the household as the site of welfare and domestic violence. In this sense, the family is not just a social unit but an economic one, tasked with stabilizing a system that underfunds care while demanding its continuous provision.

Disabled individuals are made dependent on arrangements that are themselves precarious, with access to care mediated through relationships that may be unstable or coercive. To frame labor reform as a threat to disabled communities, therefore, misidentifies the source of risk. The demand to “stop wasting our lives” thus exceeds wage theft. It articulates a broader refusal of an arrangement in which the costs of care are unevenly distributed and politically obscured. The question is not whether the risk to Medicaid can be justified, but how risk is allocated, and why it continues to fall on those with the least power to refuse it.

We have arrived at this difficult moment because home care workers and their allies do not trust neoliberal reforms to our healthcare system. We already know that compromises with the CPC will exclude the needs of the most marginalized, no matter the shape of the negotiations. DSA must cut through the staged conflict between home care workers and disabled New Yorkers. We cannot allow different sections of the working class to be pitted against one another to preserve the interests of insurance companies and home-care sweatshops. We have seen that neoliberal insurance regimes devalue the lives of both groups and render them invisible. DSA must support the No More 24 Act and the refusal to make the needs of home care workers illegible through backroom horse-trading in the state legislature.

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