Researching Health & Safety Issues

Every day, countless workers are injured or made sick on the job. Effective research can uncover details about these preventable tragedies and inform your campaign strategies moving forward, as well as provide opportunities to engage with members to help pressure employers to make jobs safer. In this workshop, Kevin Riley and Ivy Torres from the UCLA Labor Occupational Safety & Health Program (LOSH) will walk you through the best ways to incorporate health and safety issues into your strategic research campaigns, how to find data on health and safety violations, and share best practices for working with Cal/OSHA and other enforcement agencies for best outcomes.

Kevin Riley is the Director at LOSH, where he oversees the center’s broad portfolio of worker training, participatory research, and capacity building initiatives. He has nearly two decades of experience in the occupational health field, having served in prior roles as LOSH Research Director and Program Director for the NIEHS-funded Western Region Universities Consortium (WRUC). Kevin’s research has examined the injury experiences of workers in the low-wage labor market, community-level associations between heat-related hospitalizations and outdoor work, and working conditions for residential day laborers and domestic workers. His interests also include the history of occupational safety and health policy advocacy.

Kevin teaches a course on worker health within the Fielding School of Public Health and the UCLA Labor Studies Program. He has served on advisory committees for the California Department of Industrial Relations, the National Occupational Research Agenda, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the National Clearinghouse for Worker Safety and Health Training, and the Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics.

He holds a PhD in sociology and a master’s in public health, both from UCLA.

Ivy Torres is a Research Analyst at LOSH and is responsible for working closely with community partners and graduate student researchers to analyze issues related to worker health and safety. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Health from the University of California, Irvine, an MA in Chicana and Chicano Studies from San Jose State University, and a BS in Development Sociology from Cornell University.

Ivy is passionate about addressing occupational health inequities that disproportionately affect people from historically marginalized communities and believes everyone should be able to work with dignity. In the past, her research has examined how work contributes to the early onset of physical disabilities among immigrant Latina women.

Outside of work, Ivy enjoys reading fiction, going on hikes, working on jigsaw puzzles, and dancing.