An employee-centered framework for healthy workplaces: implementing a critically holistic, participative, and structural model through the Equitable Food Initiative

ABSTRACT Critical scholars have critiqued workplace health promotion (WHP) discourses for extending managerial influence on workers’ lives, shifting health responsibilities to workers, and disregarding occupational health and safety (OHS) and other structural issues. This essay promotes a worker-centered framework for workplace health, featuring (1) the holistic integration of WHP, OHS, and wellness as well as economic, environmental, and consumer health, (2) substantive worker voice, and (3) structural mechanisms to support worker interests. A case study of five Equitable Food Initiative (EFI)-certified farms demonstrates how these features can be enacted in practice. EFI is a multi-stakeholder, third-party verification and consumer labeling initiative aimed at improving farm working conditions, promoting food safety and environmental stewardship, and boosting business outcomes. Although EFI was not designed as a traditional OHS or WHP initiative, the certified farms in this study model an integrated and participatory approach to employee well-being that also encompasses fenceline communities and consumers.