Work, which is how we spend most of our waking hours, has a huge effect on our health and our ability to care for ourselves, our families, and our communities. But in many factories around the world, workers face conditions that harm their health, endanger their lives, and keep them poor. This book provides tools to change that to support workers, health promoters, union organizers, and employers in their efforts to create safer, healthier, fairer, and more fulfilling workplaces. The insights and techniques in the
Workers' Guide to Health and Safety are useful in any factory, and especially in the garment, shoe, and electronics industries.
Contents include
- How to recognize workplace dangers caused by chemicals, machines, and more
- Practical solutions to common workplace problems
- How to be a workers health promoter, and ideas for training
- Activities and stories from workers and organizers
- How to fight violence, gender discrimination, abuse of migrant workers, and low wages, which all affect workers' health
- Work-related information on first aid, nutrition, mental health, family planning, and how to avoid HIV, TB, and other diseases
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.
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.
