In New York City, how come horses are now treated better than women?
Just as women home care workers were standing up against the inhumane 24-hour workday, City Council Speaker Julie Menin championed a bill to end exploitation—not for the women workers, but for the carriage horses in Central Park. Meanwhile, the bill to abolish the 24-hour workday, the No More 24 Act, remained stalled due to Speaker Menin repeatedly breaking her promises, leaving women to continue suffering. The workers took a series of actions, including hunger strikes outside City Hall, garnering broad public support; even the United Nations condemned Menin for perpetuating this abusive practice.
It was at this juncture that discordant voices began to appear in the media. Politico, a political news site, published a series of articles targeting the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association (CSWA)—one of the groups in the movement to end the 24-hour workday. The timing of these articles was no coincidence. They reflected Menin’s willingness to fabricate outrageous excuses and mislead the public in order to demean women—placing them below animals. Below, we refute these baseless accusations to set the record straight.
As an organization helping workers fight for justice, CSWA required financial support; we applied for City funding to serve home attendants and other workers, and the City allocated $51,000 in total to us. We have not taken or spent a single penny of this money: while the funding was officially approved, we have not completed the final administrative procedure, so the funds remained with the city. These facts are easily verifiable.
Yet, disregarding the facts, Speaker Menin quickly froze the funds, citing an “investigation into whether the money was being used for political activities.” One must ask: how could we use money for “political activities” when we hadn’t even taken it yet? Since this pretext was too absurd to hold water, the real reason for Menin freezing the funds became glaringly obvious: retaliation against us for opposing the 24-hour workday and criticizing her for discriminating against women!
Furthermore, she enlisted disreputable so-called “journalists” in an attempt to smear and undermine our movement. This “reporter,” Lotus Chau—the head reporter at Sing Tao Daily—has for years authored articles expressing anti-Black sentiment. She has produced numerous biased and factually incorrect reports targeting Afro-Latino City Council member Christopher Marte, while lavishly praising insurance companies and home care agencies—such as the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC)—that have stolen hard-earned wages of home care workers. In 2024, she even received an award from the insurance company VNS Health. Yet, regarding the violence and wage theft home care workers endure during 24-hour shifts, she dismissively remarked that it was “not news.” Most recently, she teamed up with Politico “reporter” Chris Sommerfeldt to concoct a series of baseless articles.
VNS Health’s awards ceremony on October 17, 2024. Lotus Chau (front row, first from right) and CPC President Wayne Ho (back row, fifth from left) were both among the award recipients. Chau’s husband, Rick Ho, is the General Manager of Sing Tao Daily; under his management, the newspaper has consistently published articles encouraging sweatshops to exploit Chinese workers.
In these articles, they seized upon the fact that staff organizer Zishun Ning was using his spare time to help the Marte campaign to assert—without basis—that “CSWA was helping Marte’s election,” even going so far as to falsely label him a representative for CSWA during interviews. Having covered the Chinatown community for years, how could Lotus Chau possibly be unaware that Zishun is not a principal leader of CSWA? Why didn’t she interview Wing Lam the representative? Was she deliberately distorting the facts, or has she simply lost her mind? Furthermore, even though Zishun clearly stated that CSWA had not taken a single penny from the City government, how could these “reporters” claim he “failed to specify exactly which funding” was involved? Was this a case of gratuitous fabrication, or has their logic descended to a new level of incoherence? Additionally, in Chris Sommerfeldt’s report, Zishun asked the reporter to cover women being tortured in 24-hour shifts; yet, in the Chinese-language coverage, Lotus Chau omitted this part entirely. Doesn’t this clearly demonstrate that she is aiding Menin in suppressing these care workers?
It is also worth noting that Lotus Chau completely ignored the home care workers’ hunger strike that shook the society. When she did mention the workers’ actions, she wrote that the workers were “on a hunger strike yet drinking chicken broth.” Does she lack the basic common sense to know that consuming broth is permissible during a hunger strike? A “reporter” of such caliber colluding with Menin—who uses flimsy excuses to retaliate against our movement—is truly a match made in hell.
The fact that they have gone to such great lengths to smear the No More 24 movement proves just how deeply the campaign against the 24-hour workday has resonated with the public; it further exposes their role in abetting insurance companies and home care agencies in the torment of women. We encourage everyone who opposes the 24-hour workday to turn this noise into motivation. Mobilize your friends and family to join the big protest outside City Hall at noon on Saturday, October 3rd, to protest Menin’s disparagement of women and demand that she abolish the 24-hour workday!
