Healthy Work Initiative
Many workers face precarious employment, including low wages, unpredictable schedules, limited benefits, and unsafe working conditions. These challenges can negatively affect both physical and mental health. By addressing these conditions, we work towards improving health while advancing economic stability and equity.
The Healthy Work Initiative helps make work safer, healthier, and more equitable for everyone in Cook County. Through education, research, and partnerships with communities most impacted by precarious labor and environmental injustice, the initiative helps prevent injuries and illness, promotes healthy workplaces, and supports a justice-dignified oriented economy for healthier communities.
What is the Precarious Workforce?
Precarious work refers to jobs that are insecure, unstable, or unpredictable. These jobs often offer low wages, few or no benefits, limited opportunities for advancement, and little protection from discrimination, exploitation, or unsafe working conditions. As a result, many workers hold multiple jobs or rely on several sources of income to make ends meet.
Workers in precarious employment include day laborers, domestic workers, restaurant and food service employees, caregivers, food production workers, warehouse and factory workers, construction workers, and many people in the growing gig economy.
Today, an estimated 30% to 50% of all employment is considered precarious, affecting approximately 1.4 million workers across Cook County, including Chicago.
Why This Matters
As humans, most of our waking lives run through two powerful channels: how we work and how we rest. There is strong evidence that market forces, rather than individual choices, shape health outcomes and inequities.
So, the next time you think about your health and quality of life, remember there is only so much you can control. The rest requires collective action, accountability, and culture shifting of what is and what is not acceptable.
Decent work, dignified economies that improve the quality of life for all, should be our collective goal.
About the Healthy Work Initiative
The Healthy Work Initiative was established to serve as an ongoing regional level response to harm done by exploitive markets and market players.
The initiative brings together workers, community organizations, and employers to make workplaces safer, healthier, and fairer for people throughout Suburban cook county.
Programs
- Education and outreach on Workers’ Rights, Health Promotion, and Safety Mitigation for workers
- Research, data, analysis, publication and recommendations for employee and employers in Cook County
- Enforcement of laws and implementation of better business practices for healthier workforces
Impact
From 2022 to February 2026
- Reached, educated, or trained nearly 390,000 workers.
- Tracked 527 workplace violations.
- Supported 254 community- and worker-led solutions.
- Helped establish 23 worker safety committees.
- Contributed to six policy and systems changes that strengthen worker protections.
Stay Connected
Contact us:
Felipe Tendick-Matesanz
Regional Public Health Officer, Program Lead Healthy Work Initiative
Email: [email protected]
Updated September 9, 2026, 10:22 AM