By Kim Kelly on January 10, 2024

Labor journalist Kim Kelly, author of “Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor,” was a participant and panelist at the National Conference for Worker Safety and Health (COSHCON2023). Below, she shares her reflections and experience of the event. 

In December, hundreds of workers, organizers, union members and public health experts converged on a conference center just outside of Baltimore to wrestle with some of the biggest issues facing the U.S. working class today. The 2023 National Conference on Worker Safety and Health (COSHCON2023) was held in person at the Maritime Conference Center in Linthicum Heights, MD after several years of convening in a virtual-only setting. One of my primary goals in attending the conference this year was to find out what the nation’s worker health and safety advocates were focused on, and what they saw as the biggest challenges facing workers right now.

The COSH folks definitely came up with a jam-packed conference schedule. Speakers Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su and National Employment Law Project President Rebecca Dixon addressed the attendees with messages of strength and solidarity. Journalists Helina Selemon, Claudia Irizarry Aponte, and myself (filling in for Lauren Kaori Gurley of the Washington Post, who was on a 24-hour strike that day!) converged for a morning media panel that sought to demystify the reporting process and share storytelling strategies with the audience. Social events gave folks a further chance to mingle and connect.    

Notably, it was also an entirely bilingual conference, reflecting National COSH’s commitment to language justice. Interpretation equipment was provided to all monolingual speakers, and a number of sessions were conducted in both English and Spanish alongside several Spanish-only workshops. Floating interpreters also wandered freely throughout the conference’s expo section and made themselves available to anyone who needed help communicating. Given the diverse makeup of the conference attendees, this extra step added both accessibility and utility. Immigrant workers from Spanish-speaking countries make up one of the largest and most vulnerable blocs in the U.S. working class, and comprise a significant part of the workforce in high-risk industries like agriculture, construction, and manufacturing. In 2024, it would be awfully nice to see more labor events and large gatherings in general follow National COSH’s lead on this front!  

COSHCON offered a wide range of workshops on everything from identifying toxic hazards, to making effective reports to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, to uplifting the voices of black and brown workers, to advocating for immigrant worker rights, to ending workplace sexual harassment. I was particularly interested in the workshops focused on climate, and learning about how various groups have been able to lead successful campaigns to improve heat standards and regulations. There was something for everyone, really, and I met people from across the labor movement and around the country who were dedicated to learning as much as they could. I also got to say hello to some folks from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), who has been a massive help with my recent In These Times investigation into the black lung crisis, and connect with quite a few interesting new sources myself. As a labor journalist, attending COSHCON just about filled up my ideas notebook for the next six months!

While the conference featured speakers and sponsors from across the wider labor and worker health and safety movement, unions like RWDSU, AFSCME, AFT, National Nurses United, UFCW, IUPAT, the UAW, the Teamsters, NEA, and the Steelworkers were heavily represented. The International Organization of Masters, Mates & Pilots Union headquarters sat just a stone’s throw away, too, and the conference center itself was decorated with plenty of nautical reminders of the importance of taking safety seriously. (At least one display was entirely made up of photos of shipwrecked or lost vessels). The latter caught my eye during a break between sessions, and I appreciated the thematic throughline: after all, worker safety requires an all hands on deck approach. 

Throughout it all, though, one word that kept coming up in conversation was one I’d been hearing all year, and for several years prior, too: understaffing. It was not a surprise. Report after report, statement after statement, and rally after rally has seen workers and their unions lay out the danger of understaffing in a wide variety of industries, and the problem continues to haunt worker health and safety advocates as little progress is made. The healthcare field has been hit especially hard, and employers are to blame for refusing to create a healthy, equitable workplace for the thousands of healthcare workers who are killing themselves to keep their patients alive. Their situation is not unique, either; railroad workers, farmworkers, utility workers, and countless other professions depend on safe staffing levels to protect both the workers and the people they care for directly or indirectly. When employers allow workplace safety to fall by the wayside and ignore workers’ health and wellbeing in the name of chasing profits, we all suffer. 

That’s why gatherings like COSHCON are so important, and why the labor movement needs to continue investing time and resources into equipping workers with the tools they need to advocate for themselves and their coworkers. The empathy, camaraderie, and mutual respect on display at this conference was heartening, but seeing how much practical, actionable information was shared was even more inspiring. We all have a lot of work to do, but it’s important to remember that we’re all in this together, too. Being surrounded by people who really, really care about the wellbeing of their fellow workers was a truly beautiful feeling, and gave me much-needed hope for the year—and years—to come.