Abstract
The Hesperian Workers’ Guide to Health and Safety is the collective product not just of a team of experienced popular educators but of hundreds of workers worldwide. The authors have created a reference manual for occupational health and safety with the needs, circumstances, and priorities of workers in mind. They include special consideration of workers in the Global South involved in manufacturing consumer products for export to the North.
Hesperian is widely renowned for its popular health volume Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Healthcare Handbook. Since the 1970s, this compilation of basic public health principles, first aid, and natural remedies has turned lay men and women into barefoot doctors across regions where clinics and hospitals are seldom found. With its plain, readable prose and simple illustrations, the guide has been translated into dozens of languages and embraced by the Peace Corps, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF).
The Workers’ Guide to Health and Safety has similar aspirations for occupational health. The Guide is divided into thirty-three short topical chapters. After an introductory section focusing on empowerment, rights, and organizing, three chapters describe safety and health in some important industries, twelve focus on specific material hazards (such as falls, electricity, and chemicals), and fifteen more on “social dangers,” a category addressing areas such as stress, nutrition, discrimination, workplace violence, and pollution.
Consistent with basic principles of adult education, the book’s chapters are broken into short sections with frequent subheadings. They are easy to read, free of technical terms and jargon, and punctuated with frequent illustrations. Each chapter ends with interactive group activities.
The Workers’ Guide is the product of a long process of participatory design. Authors drafted chapters and segments, and then cooperated with community and labor organizations to test them with workers, refining language and design according to the feedback they received.
Although presented as a resource for worker safety and health generally, the Guide was clearly built around the experience of workers in the maquiladoras and export processing zones of the Global South. Chapters address garment, shoe, and electronics manufacturing, and topical chapters address the hazards and social circumstances likely to obtain in such environments. North American labor educators teaching occupational safety and health—more likely to be leading programs for retail, construction, transportation, or health care workers than garment workers—will need to keep this in mind when considering it as a possible classroom text.
The Workers’ Guide to Health and Safety will, however, reward those who want to think about how they can improve the materials they are using in worker education. As a community, we often miss the mark in one of two directions: distributing material and information that is too technical for a lay audience, or developing lesson plans and activities that boost student confidence and participation by making few demands. The Workers’ Guide strikes a good balance between delivering substantial information on the subject matter without lapsing into technical details that inhibit comprehension.