About Us

We are experiencing an era of historic economic inequality. More of us are in temporary and part-time jobs, unable to make ends meet, laboring in dangerous workplaces, and suffering exploitation by employers. Employers have been empowered to seek runarounds, loopholes, and legislation seeking to divorce themselves from their responsibilities to their workers. Now more than ever we must come together with unions, community groups, and legal and health professionals to organize for safety, security, and health. In this fight for justice, those of us who are most vulnerable - immigrants, youth, and low-wage earners - are leaders with voices that must be heard.

Mission

MassCOSH strives to ensure that all workers earn their living and return home alive and well. MassCOSH unites workers, unions and community groups with environmental and health activists, to end dangerous work conditions, to organize for safe, secure jobs, and to advocate for healthy communities. Through training, technical assistance and building community/labor alliances, MassCOSH mobilizes its members and develops leaders in the movement to end unsafe work conditions.

Vision

Only through collective power will workers improve workplace conditions and influence the policies that govern these conditions. We believe that those directly impacted by unsafe conditions must provide the leadership for change. We build solidarity by bringing together workers and their allies across race, class, age, disability, sexual orientation, language, and ethnicity.

Our Priorities, the People

MassCOSH has a special focus on workers who are under-represented and often in harm’s way: immigrants, youth, low wage earners, workers of color, emergency response and hazardous waste workers and families of fallen workers.

We actively collaborate with allies who are at the heart of our mission: unions and labor organizations, occupational health professionals, lawyers, community and faith groups and students and staff in public schools.

Accomplishments

Since 1976, MassCOSH has provided training to more than 20,000 workers, union representatives and community groups. As of 1980 we have also been deeply involved in eleven legislative campaigns to pass and enforce laws that ensure worker's rights with a special emphasis on young people and immigrants. MassCOSH has also assisted tens of thousands of workers and unions seeking information and support on identifying and addressing workplace hazards, navigating workers' compensation and strategies to organize for safe working conditions.

MassCOSH celebrates numerous recent achievements, including:

  • Passage of a groundbreaking law to halt temporary worker exploitation
  • Ban on a deadly floor finishing chemical
  • Landmark environmental health improvements in Boston Public Schools, earning prestigious recognition from the EPA
  • A new three-day leadership academy for youth, engaging teens across the state in promoting job safety
  • Creation of the first teen-written sexual harassment curriculum
  • Executive Order issued, initiating a comprehensive assessment of state employee hazards