Twenty-Five Years After 9/11

9/11 marks the World Trade Center attacks and demands annual commemoration. What receives far less attention, however, is the twofold crisis of social reproduction that followed. After 2001, Canal Street became an arbitrary geographic line separating those considered eligible for cleanup and assistance from those who were not, even though toxic air and dust did not respect that boundary. At the same time, as the local workforce was being retrained into hospitality and homecare, another arbitrary boundary emerged around working time. In homecare, the 24-hour workday was divided into payable working hours and supposedly nonworking hours. The assumption was that workers could reliably receive uninterrupted sleep and meal breaks and therefore should be paid only for the hours they were considered to be working, not for the time designated for sleep and meals. However, the bodies of patients and their needs did not conform to this dividing line. Many required care throughout the full 24-hour period, and therefore required workers to remain available for the full 24 hours. 

In both cases, the Canal Street boundary and the work/nonwork boundary imposed administrative divisions that ignored what fell outside them. Toxic particles moved beyond geographic boundaries, just as bodily vulnerability and the unpredictable demands of care exceeded the boundaries imposed on working time. What these measures failed to account for were precisely the material conditions of social reproduction: the movement of toxic substances, interrupted sleep, bodily needs, illness, and the continuous labor required to sustain life.

Geography of Exclusion

Twenty-five years after September 11, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration opened a public portal containing roughly 170,000 pages of previously withheld city records on air quality, health, and the government’s response to the attacks. The initial release included records from the office of the former Deputy Mayor Robert M. Harding under former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In an internal memorandum addressed to Harding, the city identified a list of potential lawsuits arising from the aftermath of 9/11. Among them were claims that “health advisories caused individuals either to return to the area too soon (causing toxic exposure or emotional harm) or too late (causing economic hardship),” that “rescue workers were provided with faulty equipment or no equipment (i.e. respirators),” that workers had been subjected to an “unsafe workplace (OSHA, FEMA, Labor Law),” and that there had been “inadequate clean up.” (see Michelle Goldstein, memorandum to Robert Harding, Deputy Mayor, “Legislative Alternatives to Limit the City’s Liability relating to 9/11/01," document NYC-WTC_000136670 in NYC 9/11 public portal). 

These records reinforce what the Beyond Ground Zero Network and its coalition members had argued for years in their campaign: government assurances about air quality had left workers and residents exposed to toxic substances, and those exposed required economic reparation as well as long-term health monitoring, treatment, and assistance. 

What has received far less attention is what 9/11 did to social reproduction—the everyday conditions that allow people to sustain life. As feminist author and activist Silvia Federici writes, the body is not an isolated entity but is connected to our natural environment. Our bodily needs include “the need for the sun, for the blue sky and the green of trees, for the smell of the woods and the oceans.” In the post-9/11 era, the displacement of social reproduction did not necessarily involve removing people from their homes and neighborhoods. Instead, people remained in place while the conditions necessary to sustain their lives were contaminated and repeatedly re-contaminated. This is an in-situ form of displacement with regards to social reproduction. People stayed where they were, but the material conditions that sustained their lives were degraded. 

As Congressman Jerry Nadler recently recalled, the government drew an arbitrary boundary at Canal Street to determine who would be covered by 9/11 health protections, even though debris and contamination from the collapsed towers did not stop there. Canal Street was more than a line for deciding who could receive cleanup, health care, and public assistance. It became a boundary that determined who received greater protection from contamination and who was left more exposed across Lower Manhattan.

This disaster boundary split two communities, Chinatown and the Lower East Side waterfront, with some residents and workers included in the designated area, while others just a short distance away were not.  

Research studies show evidence of contamination beyond Canal Street. Dr. Thomas Cahill’s UC Davis team found asbestos fibers and unusually high concentrations of very fine particles in air samples collected about a mile from Ground Zero. These particles could enter buildings, settle indoors, and later become re-suspended, creating the possibility of re-contamination. Independent studies and congressional testimonies documented contamination several blocks north of Canal Street and in parts of Brooklyn. These findings did not lead the EPA to expand its residential cleanup zone north of Canal Street. The newly released files show that the EPA later appeared to distance itself from the UC Davis study. The finding contrasted sharply with EPA head Christine Todd Whitman’s assurances that the air was safe. The UC Davis and related findings then largely disappeared from public discussion until resurfacing in the newly released 9/11 records.

The decade following 9/11, residents and community organizations consistently warned the government that its cleanup program was too limited and poorly communicated. In one newly released City record, a community member, referring to the work of 9/11 Environmental Action, wrote to Mayor Michael Bloomberg that “most people living in the cleanup zone” still did not know that a cleanup program existed and that some Chinatown residents had “never heard of the EPA.” Even City officials questioned the logic of the Canal Street boundary. One official noted that people living “2 feet above Canal St.” were being turned away from relief services and asked whether there should be “a middle ground between all five boroughs and below Canal.” 

The findings from Beyond Ground Zero and 9/11 Environmental Action still carry weight twenty-five years later. In 2006, Beyond Ground Zero published Treating the Tragedy: The 9-11 Health Crisis in New York City’s Low-Income Communities. Three years later, the group joined 9/11 Environmental Action to publish WE COUNT! Documenting the 9/11 Health Crisis 8 Years Later.* The reports documented widespread respiratory problems, asthma, persistent coughing, allergies, gastrointestinal problems, skin conditions, anxiety, depression, and other illnesses among low-income residents and workers in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. More than 65 percent of 2,027 people surveyed for the earlier study reported 9/11-related health problems. In the 2009 follow-up, 80.2 percent of nearly 900 respondents said their respiratory problems had worsened. This included residents living on both sides of Canal Street. And yet, only those residents south of Canal had access to cleanup, health monitoring, and assistance. 

Crisis of Carework 

The rebuilding process deepened the crisis of social reproduction of local residents. Garment factories closed; restaurant employment declined. Redevelopment plans promoted tourism, new office development, and job retraining. The workers hit hardest were often middle-aged immigrant women with limited or no English who had depended on the garment economy. Post-9/11 planning documents recommended employment retraining for jobs in homecare, hotels, and construction. Many former garment workers had since then moved into the expanding homecare and hospitality industries.

By the 2010s, this cohort of immigrant women workers began to publicly challenge the conditions they encountered in homecare. Their central grievance was the 24-hour workday. The law states that a home-care worker assigned to a 24-hour shift can be paid for 13 hours if she receives eight hours for sleep, including five uninterrupted hours, and three hours for meals. However, workers find that the realities of patient needs make this virtually impossible. Lawsuits against the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC) Home Attendant Program, for example, show that workers remained with patients for the entire 24-hour shifts while only being paid for 12 hours. The Ain’t I a Woman?! campaign estimates that CPC workers are owed roughly $90 million in unpaid wages. 

The pattern, then, is not simply that one industry disappeared and another replaced it. The post-9/11 public health crisis reorganized the labor of social reproduction itself. Men and women in Chinatown and the Lower East Side were expropriated from the basic conditions needed to reproduce everyday life as their homes, workplaces, bodies, and air were contaminated. But displaced women garment workers faced an additional, gendered form of expropriation. As garment jobs disappeared, many were pushed into 24-hour care work, where large portions of their labor were unpaid. These were women who already performed largely unpaid reproductive labor in their own households; they were now drawn into a publicly financed care system to reproduce the lives of others while receiving pay for only part of the day. Through the lens of social reproduction, displacement does not fall on everyone in the same way. Both men and women can be separated from the conditions necessary to sustain life, but women are additionally expropriated through the devaluation and degradation of carework. In post-9/11 Chinatown, the destruction of one form of livelihood therefore helped produce another in which immigrant women’s capacity to care became a new terrain of accumulation.

The homecare workers’ struggle has also inspired workers in other industries to challenge the broader degradation and devaluation of care work. In 2026, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, homecare workers staged two hunger strikes calling on the city to address this injustice by passing the No More 24 Act, Intro 303, which would end the 24-hour workday and replace it with two 12-hour shifts.    

In response to this growing mobilization, however, union leaders and legal advocates with economic ties to insurance companies supported carve-outs that would preserve the 24-hour workday for unionized workers and for patients deemed to require round-the-clock care. Such exemptions produce a troubling contradiction: some workers would gain protection from 24-hour exploitation, while others would remain subject to it in the name of patient need and the right to work. On October 3, 2026, more than a thousand protesters gathered at New York City Hall to demand that City Council Speaker Julie Menin pass the No More 24 Act in its original form: no more 24-hour workdays for any worker.

This essay is by FRI Visiting Researcher, Kai Yang, who has conducted extensive research on the impacts of 9/11 on Koreatown, New York.

*For access to these reports, please contact Kai Yang at [email protected].