Purpose: About every three days, a child dies in a U.S. agriculture-related incident, and each day, at least 33 children are seriously injured. During the previous decade, youth worker fatalities in agriculture have exceeded all other industries combined. In the last few years, child labor regulations have been proposed and challenged at state and national levels. Hazardous Occupation Orders in Agriculture have not been updated since the 1970s. A national strategy is needed to accelerate the translation of emerging knowledge, technologies, and best practices into effective, scalable strategies that protect the safety and health of children in agriculture.

Methods: The original National Action Plan was updated in 2001, in 2012 and in 2025. The process for developing this 2025 version involved five distinct phases, including think tank sessions through video conferences and in-person meetings. Participants included child safety advocates, farmworkers, researchers, educators, agribusiness and representatives of farm or youth-related organizations. Participants identified successes, gaps, and questions related to seven theme areas.

Findings: The plan incorporates several new topics critical to child labor in agriculture, including automated agricultural production practices, new technologies, changing organizational and public policies, environmental exposures, and extreme weather. The plan describes the background to the national initiative, major areas of progress over three decades, persistent issues and gaps, and guiding vision and values. Seven specific goals address: 1) Leadership; 2) Data; 3) Public Policy; 4) Organizational Policy; 5) Research; 6) Dissemination and Implementation; and 7) Emerging Issues. Each goal is accompanied with strategies and anticipated outcomes.

Translation: The updated 2025 plan provides timely guidance for addressing priorities and offers an opportunity to unify community members and stakeholders to effect change for youth working in agriculture. Public health has a vital role to safeguard children working and ensure the next generation of workers has every opportunity to thrive.

Background and Objectives: In June 2025, federal immigration officials began rolling out large-scale enforcement activities in communities across Southern California. While raids and arrests have taken place across a variety of settings, worksites have served as a notable target for enforcement actions, with raids occurring in garment factories, car washes, construction sites, agricultural fields, and public sites where day laborers typically seek work. The goal of this presentation is to describe what is known about the breadth and nature of these activities and reflect on their public health impacts, particularly for immigrant workers and their families.

Methods: We will rely on a combination of information and statistics from local media, CBO reports, and publicly available government sources to provide an overall portrait of enforcement activities and impacts in Southern California. Results will be supplemented with observations from our ongoing outreach and education activities with local worker organizations, many of whom directly support workers impacted by enforcement activities.

Results: A recent report by the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles surveyed 330 Mexican nationals detained in immigration raids between June 6 and July 6, 2025. The majority were working individuals -- about 16% worked in car washes, 13% worked in construction, 13% worked in factories, and 11% worked in landscaping. Many individuals experience ongoing fear while at their jobs. Meanwhile, actions targeting workplaces have a chilling effect on workers’ willingness to confront workplace hazards and/or labor law violations. Such dynamics have been felt particularly acutely by day laborers seeking work on cleanup and reconstruction projects in Altadena and Palisades, which are recovering from massive wildfires earlier in the year.

Conclusions: Federal immigration enforcement activities have caused economic and health hardships for communities that were already vulnerable. Lessons from Southern California can inform strategies for other communities threatened with similar enforcement strategies.

Background and Objective(s): Effective safety training is essential to advancing occupational health. The United Steelworkers (USW) Tony Mazzocchi Center (TMC), funded via the NIEHS Worker Training Program (WTP), is a training organization that utilizes a worker-trainer approach. Worker-trainers are full-time workers that also serve as part-time workplace safety and health instructors. Previous research supports the use of worker-trainers as one of the most effective ways to advance safety and health in the workplace. They understand the hazards on the job and use methods that empower class participants. An evaluation project was conducted to understand how TMC worker-trainers influence workplace safety and health at DOE sites. The purpose of the evaluation was to investigate how TMC DOE worker-trainers are safety and health resources for their co-workers outside of training to assess the broader impact of TMC training on occupational safety and health. We hypothesized that these worker-trainers have gained credibility amongst their coworkers as knowledgeable safety and health resources on the job.

Methods: An online survey was distributed via email to 79 TMC DOE worker-trainers. The survey consisted of 35 questions, including both closed and open-ended questions to obtain quantitative and qualitative data.

Results: In total, 35 survey responses were received, resulting in a response rate of approximately 44%. Participants reported if they have been asked a safety and health question, including the topic, outside of training by a co-worker. Survey results indicate that the most asked about topics include stop or pause work authority (29, 82.9%), radiological hazards and/or radiation protection (31, 88.6%), how to elevate health and safety concerns (26, 74.3%), personal protective equipment (27, 77.1%), and work procedures/work packages (25, 71.4%).

Conclusion(s): Survey results suggest that worker-trainers are valued by their co-workers as trusted and knowledgeable health and safety resources in the workplace.

Background: Labor unions are organizations that have a critical role in enhancing their members’ OSH conditions through empowerment, worker advocacy (e.g., policies, procedures), and collective bargaining (e.g., better wages, benefits). Since the COVID-19 pandemic and the upheaval of “normal” work arrangements, many workers are changing the way they view work and reassessing priorities for work-life balance. As such, understanding public discourse around unionization is critical to advance OSH research and practice. Social media represents one significant avenue for workers and labor unions to mobilize, educate and connect with each other due to its ease of use and abilities to tap into peer-to-peer networks to spread advocacy messages. Over 80% of U.S. adults ages 18-39 say they ever use any social media platforms, underscoring its utility to understand public discourse.

Methods: We conducted a deductive content analysis using data from YouTube shorts. We only focused on YouTube Shorts videos posted online from public accounts in the U.S. that are related to unionization. We searched videos posted from March 20^th, 2020 to April 1^st, 2024 with keywords and hashtags such as: union, unionization, union strong, mobilization, worker rights, and strike.

Results: A total of 1,332 videos were reviewed, and 134 videos (10%) were eligible for content analyses. Majority of the videos were pro-union (84%), and showed content related union organizing (60%), or news related to unionization, and strike participation (59%). Fewer videos focused on educating the public about unionization (24%), or benefits of unions (24%). Many videos were told from the viewpoint of a worker (39%), and often expressed “pride” (61%) in its tone.

Conclusion: These findings indicate that short videos on YouTube is a feasible platform to disseminate a wide variety of information related to unionization. The potential use of YouTube for effective communication and activism should be further considered.

Objective: In 2020, emergency paid sick leave was implemented for most workers in the United States. This paid sick leave provision at the end of the year. This study examined changes in the annual percentage of workers with access to paid sick leave from 2019 to 2023 and differences in availability according to demographic and socioeconomic.

Methods: Data from the 2019 to 2023 National Health Interview Surveys was used to calculate the annual percentage of workers with access to paid sick leave overall and according to age group, sex, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and the ratio of the worker’s family’s income to the poverty ratio.

Results: There was an 8% increase in the percentage of workers reporting access to paid sick leave in 2020 (66.8%) compared to 2019 (62.0%). Only workers with less than a high school education did not have significant increases in the availability of paid sick leave in 2019 compared to 2020. There were no substantial changes in the percentage of workers reporting access to paid sick leave after 2021. Disparities in access to paid sick leave remained similar in 2019 and 2023, with lower access among those with less than a high school education and lower incomes.

Conclusions: Temporary access to paid sick leave during the COVID-19 pandemic did not result in significant increases in access to paid sick leave after the pandemic. Additionally, disparities in access to paid sick leave were not reduced by temporary access.

Background: The demand for Home Care Aides (HCAs) is surging, as they play a crucial role in addressing the needs of the dramatically increasing elderly population in the United States. Despite this, HCAs’ health needs are often neglected. Predominantly women, immigrants, and minority groups, HCAs typically work under challenging conditions, including low wages, long hours, and physically and emotionally demanding tasks, which may adversely affect their health. Objective: This study aims to identify health disparities regarding occupational factors, social determinants, and health risk factors. Understanding HCAs’ health disparities is critical for developing strategies to support their well-being and enable them to provide high-quality care. Methods: A multimode survey was conducted online and via phone calls in 6 languages (English, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese). Three logistic regression models were compared to examine the accumulated impacts of three concepts on self-reported health. Results: 1) Behavioral and emotional health risk factors (i.e., exercise, stress, anxiety, and depression) reveal more associations with health. With these factors, the social determinantal factors (i.e., education and language) have a significant or stronger association with poor health. 2) HCAs communicating in languages other than English (Vietnamese-speaking OR: 2.86, Russian-speaking OR: 2.36, Korean-speaking OR: 2.03, Chinese-speaking OR: 1.50), having lower income (OR: 2.16) and education levels (OR: 1.61), experiencing more often stress (OR: 1.61), feeling depressed (OR: 1.78), and having longer years of service (OR: 1.15), are more likely to report poor health, controlling for age, gender, and race. Conclusion: This finding highlights the adverse health impacts on HCAs, interactively linked to their occupational, social determinants, and health risk factors. More importantly, this study underscores the urgent need to address these disparities through culturally appropriate health interventions, financial support initiatives, and work environment improvements, including for long-serving, skilled HCAs.

Background and Objective: Mental health is an important component of occupational health and safety that is often overlooked, consistent with the workplace objectives in Healthy People 2030. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Worker Training Program (WTP) has maintained a focus on mental health and resiliency throughout its history. WTP has developed several disaster worker resiliency tools to address unmet mental health needs identified after disasters. These tools help educate workers on the signs and symptoms of work-related stress, inform them about employer and community resources, and build worker resilience by understanding stress reduction and coping strategies.

At a meeting in 2024, NIEHS WTP award recipients expressed the need for a broader resiliency tool that expands the reach beyond disaster workers, and to all workers. This resiliency and mental health tool will be more flexible and versatile to match the needs of the current workforce.

Methods: WTP will review historical documents and case studies related to the program’s efforts focused on resiliency. For the resiliency tool update, WTP interviewed award recipients and the broader occupational health and safety training community to determine what resources are needed in the tool and what would be most helpful for instructors and trainees.

Results: Interviews and historical document review are ongoing, and the revised training tool for resiliency and mental health will be shared at the Annual Conference.

Conclusion: The WTP resiliency and mental health training tool will include various resources that health and safety instructors can use to raise awareness about resiliency and coping strategies for workers in hazardous trades.

Occupational health is an underemphasized topic for local public health practitioners. Increasing engagement with occupational health can create a foundation for a robust work-related injury and disease reporting system, help identify at-risk populations, and allow practitioners to create impactful messaging. This presentation reports on a tabletop exercise which had three key objectives related to occupational health: (1) promote practitioners’ awareness of work as a risk factor; (2) develop practitioners’ risk communication, group facilitation, process mapping, and presenting skills; and (3) apply a health equity lens to the assessment of an occupational public health scenario. The exercise included themes related to carbon monoxide exposure, lead exposure, heat illness, and racial/language barriers in the workplace. The three-part tabletop exercise took place at a Wisconsin-based public health conference. Part one introduced the exercise’s goals and expectations and reviewed provided materials. In part two, participants were divided into groups, reviewed the scenario, and began working through the questions which were sorted into four occupational health-related topics: 1) potential exposures, 2) at-risk populations, 3) communication strategies, and 4) prevention strategies. As groups progressed through the topics, participants would exchange roles and create visual aids to summarize their discussions. Part three opened the conversation to the larger group, where breakout groups presented their visuals and commented on the scenario and their related professional experiences. Participants held varying roles in Wisconsin’s public health workforce. Small group sizes and sufficient time enabled additional conversation and reflection. Participants bought into the four roles and their responsibilities and the topics which were discussed provided a forum for practitioners to apply their experiences to a scenario with explicit work-related hazards. Similar tabletop exercises could be used to mirror specific communities served and to engage local public health practitioners in other states who may lack a strong foundation in occupational health.