Tochtli Garcia

Before joining National COSH earlier this year, COSHCON was something I had only heard about from afar. Working as a consultant in the NYC labor movement, I knew it was a respected, bilingual gathering that brought together workers, organizers, and health and safety leaders, but it was still just a concept to me, something other people experienced.

That changed the moment I joined the National COSH team and stepped into the work of building COSHCON2025. For months, I learned what COSHCON truly is by going through past programs, reviewing workshop descriptions, designing graphics, shaping the bilingual content, and creating social media materials to bring the conference to life. I was part of the crew, working behind the scenes to help build an event I had never actually seen in person.

And then Chicago arrived.
Stepping into the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health’s Student Center East, I finally understood what I had been helping to build. The energy was immediate – alive, loud, multilingual, unapologetically worker-centered. Everywhere I looked, workers were leading: in chants, in the stories, in the workshops, in the courage that filled every corner of the space.  

COSHCON wasn’t just an event. It was a movement breathing in real time.

Opening with a chant, not a PowerPoint
COSHCON2025 didn’t open with a dry welcome or a list of housekeeping notes. It opened with a rupture.

Before the first keynote, a group of We Rise! Worker Leadership Academy graduates, also known as Risers, entered the room with signs in English and Spanish and a chant that rolled across the floor like a wave:

“¡Sí se puede! ¡Sí se puede!”

Their posters said things like:

• “An injury to one is an injury to all”
• “Organize for power, organize for safety”
• “Justice across borders, justice at work”
• “Una muerte más por calor”
• “Sin justicia no hay justicia laboral”
• “Protege a trabajadores, no a las ganancias”

I had read these messages before,  but seeing workers carry them into the room, held in their hands, voiced through their stories, shaped by their lived experience, was something entirely different. It shifted the energy instantly.  This wasn’t a conference where workers were simply an audience. Workers were the authors, the protagonists, the center of the narrative we were all there to build together.

“Challenge the normalization of the dehumanization of people”
Our opening keynote came from Stacy Davis Gates, President of the Chicago Teachers Union. She spoke about how language is used to erase people, especially immigrants, Black communities, and anyone employers or politicians treat as disposable.

The words that stayed with me:
“Challenge the normalization of the dehumanization of people.
Don’t normalize the language they use over and over again, and when someone does, ask them, What does that mean? Let them hear their own answers.”
— Stacy Davis Gates, President, Chicago Teachers Union

As the conference unfolded, I started to hear exactly what she meant.

Workers from South Florida talked about temp agencies that send people out in brutal heat all day, and then “deduct” so many fees that workers end up with no pay.

COSH leaders from Mississippi described workers who, after life-altering injuries, lose their workers’ comp after 450 weeks and are left to figure out survival on their own.

New Yorkers shared about a violent ICE raid at a Cato nutrition bar factory, how people were denied due process and ripped away from their families.

These are not “cases.” They’re human beings. And the words we choose:“illegal,” “unskilled,” “temporary”, can either reinforce dehumanization or challenge it. Stacy’s call to get “Socratic” with people (asking, “What does that mean?”) felt like a tool I could carry back into my own organizing and communications work.

Watching workers “become sponges”
One of the moments that stayed with me came fromMartín Unzueta, founder of Chicago Community and Workers’ Rights. At lunch, looking out at rows of tables full of workers, he said:

“The most powerful part of COSHCON is watching workers become sponges—absorbing every bit of knowledge they can to protect their lives and their future. We don’t empower corporations; we give workers the tools they need, because they are the ones who keep this country running and who must understand their rights to continue working with dignity and without fear.”
— Martin Unzueta, CEO & Founder, Chicago Community and Workers’ Rights

That’s exactly what COSHCON felt like: a place where workers are soaking up concrete tools, not abstract theory.

In “Your Rights, Your Power: Exercising OSHA Protections Under a Hostile Administration,” people compared real-life OSHA complaints and practiced strategies for organizing beyond the agency when the system fails.

In “Tools for Identifying Workplace Issues from a Health & Safety Lens,” folks literally mapped hazards onto paper bodies and floor plans—naming what hurts and then connecting it to the bigger power structure that creates those conditions.

In “Heat, Hazards, and Health” and “Calor, Riesgos y Salud,” participants learned to recognize the early signs of heat illness and talked about how to demand water, shade, and rest—not as favors, but as rights.

Every session felt like another brick in the wall workers are collectively building to protect one another.

Chicago as teacher: history, redlining, and resistance
COSHCON2025 didn’t just take place in Chicago; it was shaped by Chicago.
Sherman “Dilla” Thomas, a Chicago urban historian, reminded us that this city has been reckoning with injustice for a long time:

“Chicago banks taught the world how to redline — but Chicago’s West Side taught the world how to fight back. When systems fail us, this city rises up, unites, and builds something better.”
— Sherman “Dilla” Thomas, Chicago Urban Historian, cultural worker and union activist

Listening to Dilla, I understood COSHCON differently. Chicago is where the first COSH group was founded back in 1972, and now we were back at UIC, in a city that has been a laboratory for both exploitation and resistance.

Walking out of the student center into the October air after a session on Black labor history or immigrant worker defense, it felt like the streets themselves were part of the curriculum.

Language justice as a practice, not an afterthought
One of the most powerful parts of COSHCON for me—as a bilingual communicator—was seeing language justice treated as non-negotiable.

From the moment you checked in for interpretation equipment on the third floor, it was clear: Spanish wasn’t a translation slapped on at the end. It was fully integrated—plenary sessions, workshops, printed materials, slides, expo descriptions, all with consistent, careful language in both English and Spanish.

I’ve worked plenty of events where the Spanish is rushed or obviously second-class. COSHCON2025 felt different. People didn’t have to fight for their language or ask, “Will this be translated?” That dignity matters. It changes who feels like the space belongs to them.

Workshops, Expo, and the future of the movement
COSHCON is intense in the best way: three days of workshops, strategy sessions, and a high-energy Expo that gives you a snapshot of the broader movement.
At the Expo at COSHCON2025, you could pick up a passport and visit booths from:
 

• The Healthy Work Campaign, supporting organizations to tackle work-related stress
• FarmSTAND, challenging exploitation in the food system
• Polaris’s Nonechka project, using mobile tech to reach migrant farmworkers
• Ethix Merch, showing how even a t-shirt can align with worker-centered economies

On Thursday, the poster session turned the hallway into a glimpse of the future: students and advocates sharing research on everything from chemical hazards to heat standards to new models for worker education. Folks lingered, asked questions, gave feedback. You could feel the next generation of the movement taking shape right in front of us.

Held by a community: UIC and Chicago hospitality
The partnership with the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health was more than a line in the program book.

The campus facilities made it possible to host a bilingual, multi-track conference with hundreds of people moving between rooms. Staff and volunteers helped folks navigate from hotel to shuttle to workshops, always with patience and warmth. You could see the care it takes to make a space where workers feel safe, respected, and comfortable enough to learn and share vulnerable stories.

Leaving with more than notes
As COSHCON2025 closed with final reflections, I thought back to that first chant: “¡Sí se puede!”

Over three days, I witnessed heartbreak and courage sitting side by side—workers who have lost co-workers to heat, injuries, and violence; people who have been raided, deported, fired, or left without compensation. And yet, here they were, still organizing, still dreaming, still building something better together.

COSHCON happens every two years, but the work it fuels happens every single day—on job sites, in worker centers, at kitchen tables, in union halls, in WhatsApp chats and organizing meetings.

For me, as a first-timer behind the scenes and a new member of the National COSH team, COSHCON2025 was a reminder of why this work matters: it’s not about logistics or designing materials, but about defending the simple, radical belief that every worker should go to work and return home alive, respected, and whole.

I left Chicago tired, moved, and ready to take what I learned and act – to carry the lessons, tools, and commitments of workers back into our daily work.  And already thinking about the next time we get to say it together, in one room, in two languages:
An injury to one is an injury to all.
Una lesión para una persona trabajadora es una lesión para todas.