LOHP’s mission is to promote safe, healthy, and just workplaces and build the capacity of workers and worker organizations to take action for improved working conditions. We look broadly at the impact of work on health and we advance the principle that healthy jobs – which pay a living wage, provide job security and benefits, protect against hazards and harassment, have reasonable workloads, and engage workers in the decisions that affect them – are a basic human right.
As a university-based public health program, we accomplish our mission by:
- Providing training and developing materials to effectively engage workers and worker organizations in advocating for better working conditions
- Conducting research to evaluate effectiveness of interventions, document impact of health and safety hazards, and identify policy solutions.
- Supporting development of protective policies that integrate public health research and expertise. We are active in local, state, and national coalitions working for systemic change.
We are part of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health in the School of Public Health, and as such we contribute to the academic mission of the university. See more about What We Do.
Values
These core organizational values have guided our work in our 46-year history. We are committed to being:
- Worker-centered: We respect workers’ voice, experience, and leadership and emphasize addressing barriers of language, literacy, and risk of retaliation while building skills to take action.
- Partnership-driven: We believe collaborative, multi-level efforts are most effective and we work with – and facilitate partnerships between – a range of partners including workers, unions, worker centers and community organizations, agencies, employer groups, policy makers, and academics.
- Social justice oriented: We focus on improving working conditions for immigrants, workers of color, youth and other equity-seeking communities who are most at risk and we are committed to eliminating the racial and economic disparities at the intersection of work and health.
- Grounded in research: We believe in the value of evidence-based best practices and use a public health model to address root causes and achieve structural change.
Our staff includes a multi-ethnic, bilingual group of professionals with backgrounds in public health, labor, participatory adult education, curriculum development, program planning, community organizing, public policy, and qualitative research methods.
