Workers' Guide to Health and Safety

Work affects our health and our ability to care for our families and communities. Easy to use and full of illustrations, the Workers' Guide to Health and Safety demystifies occupational safety and health to make it relevant and accessible to everyone. Inside you’ll learn how to:

• recognize workplace dangers caused by chemicals, machines, repetitive motions, heat, poor ventilation, and more
• find solutions to common workplace problems, explore ways to find short-term and long-term solutions, and identify and address root causes
• become a workers’ health promoter with ideas for training others, taking action to improve conditions, and building relationships to support change
• address violence at work and push back against gender discrimination, abuse of migrant workers, and low wages
• organize for health and safety with suggested activities, tips for successful communication, and inspiring stories from workers and organizers

Also included is work-related information on first aid, nutrition, stress and mental health, family planning, and how to avoid HIV, TB, and other diseases.

Field tested by organizations around the world, the Workers’ Guide to Health and Safety provides tools to support workers, union organizers, and employers in their efforts to create safer, healthier, fairer, and more fulfilling workplaces. The insights and techniques in this book are useful in any factory, and especially in the garment, shoe, and electronics industries.

About Hesperian Health Guides: Hesperian partners with health workers, community members, medical professionals, and others around the world to develop, publish, and share accurate health information. To help all people take greater control over their health, Hesperian’s books are written using plain, easy-to-understand language, feature plentiful illustrations and are regularly updated with the latest medical information.

Todd Jailer is Hesperian's Managing Editor. Prior to working in publishing, he worked in chemical, hat, and t-shirt factories, and as an industrial electrician. He has edited many books on labor and international topics as a member of the South End Press publishing collective. Todd lived for several years in El Salvador where he worked on publications for a number of popular organizations and unions, and supported the organizing of garment workers in El Salvador's free trade factories. He has investigated conditions faced by garment workers in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, El Salvador, and Bangladesh, and collaborated in the development of the Solidarity Center publication, A Toolkit for Organizing International Campaigns.

Miriam Lara-Meloy is a project coordinator at Hesperian Health Guides. In what once was the jean capital of the world in her native Mexico, Miriam learned that people's health and well-being emerges from the interrelation of health access, fair wages, safe and healthy work, gender equality, and environmental justice. Through her volunteer work at a labor and human rights collective, as well as director of the first domestic abuse crisis line in the region, she helped create broad-based coalitions and saw firsthand the immense power that a group of dedicated and organized people can have in their workplaces and communities. As co-author of the Workers' Guide to Health and Safety, she is part of local, national, and international networks and remains passionate about Hesperian's mission to make highly technical information understandable, accessible, and actionable for all.

Maggie Robbins has more than 25 years of experience working in occupational safety and health, primarily for or with unions, including the Service Employees International Union, the California Labor Federation, and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions. She has worked as a writer, educator and curriculum developer with US unions, Hesperian Health Guides, the Industrial Health Resource Group of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Public Services International Africa sub-region. She strives to make health and safety concepts understandable and useful to workers organizing to improve their working conditions.