The Path to Worker Health, Safety, and Power Three Years On: Pandemic Aftershocks and Organizing Opportunities

Please join us for The Path to Worker Health, Safety, and Power Three Years On: Pandemic Aftershocks and Organizing Opportunities on Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 11am PT | Noon MT | 1pm CT | 2pm ET.

This 2-hour, interactive, popular education style workshop will focus on collective learning about nurturing and sustaining worker leadership for worker power: on the job, with the government, and in public discourse. It is an opportunity for funders to  reflect on your role as a worker and funder, deepen your understanding of what causes people to be unsafe at work and identify how workers’ fight for health, safety, and power intersects with your own lives and your institutional commitments to movements for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice.   

Worker powerbuilding and engagement have reached extraordinary levels in the three years since the pandemic began. As workers have organized with an energy not seen for generations, they’ve continued to center health and safety as a key issue and mobilizing tool. This is true in union and worker center campaigns, in every region of the country, and in highly exploitative industries as well as more professionalized jobs. 

Since day one of the pandemic, the National COSH network has helped Black, Brown, immigrant, and poor workers respond to the crisis and, from the ashes of their losses, take action to shift power. Workers backed by the network have won safer, more dignified conditions and realized greater respect, drawing from movement training, leadership development, and campaign and organizing support to:

• Watchdog employers and government in the most exploitative, racist, anti-worker industries and places, like the plant nurseries and farms of Miami Dade County and Nashville, Tennessee’s booming construction industry.  
• Increase penalties for employers in high-density areas like New York, where workers secured increased fines for employers facing criminal penalties in worker death cases, after 22-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant Carlos Moncayo was buried alive in 2015 at a construction site in NYC’s meatpacking district. 
• Build stronger enforcement partnerships, winning the right to create health and safety committees in NY and LA County; pioneering an essential workers’ board in Harris County, TX; and developing formal alliances with government agencies in Florida. 
• Secure new retaliation protections for immigrant workers, helping win and strengthen the implementation of enhanced federal protections from immigration action during health and safety investigations.
• Win new benefits and health and safety protections for previously excluded workers, like overtime pay for farm workers and occupational safety and health agency protections for public sector workers.
• Strengthen union drives and contract negotiations, including in the notoriously difficult-to-organize strip club industry in Los Angeles, CA and in immigrant-dominated workplaces like Wharton, New Jersey’s Refresco bottling plant.

We can’t lose momentum now. Even as Black and Brown essential workers continue to organize and win significant gains for health, safety, and respect, they face ongoing survival needs and their campaigns are under-resourced. Please, join us and a team of dynamic COSH organizers and worker leaders on June 21, 2023 to explore workers’ health and safety as a foundational racial and economic justice issue. Let’s keep on the path to real worker power in the U.S., together.