LAUSR

In April 2013, more than 1,100 garment workers were killed in an instant in the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The worst industrial disaster in the history of the apparel industry opened the door for significant national and international efforts to improve working conditions and safety for the 4 million garment workers, the majority of whom are women, who produce more than 80% of the country’s annual export income (ILO 2018). An innovative occupational health and safety (OHS) “train-the-trainer” training project in Dhaka demonstrates the importance of grassroots-level, peerto-peer training, especially in developing countries where international clothing brands have chosen to locate their supply chains. The impact and effectiveness of worker-focused initiatives at the community level are often overlooked with all the attention and resources available to internationally funded OHS programs for government agencies and employers. The OHS Initiative uses the “popular education” pedagogy for adult learners, which emphasizes participant activities and interactions with instructors that reinforce critical information, and foster training skills for effective transmission of knowledge to other adults (Baker and Wallerstein 2011). Training of trainer (ToT) programs that incorporate local social and cultural norms have been shown internationally to be effective in increasing the skills and knowledge of workers with limited literacy, such as women garment workers in Bangladesh (Szudy et al. 2003; Riley et al. 2012; Flynn et al. 2018). The principal accomplishments of the OHS Initiative in its first 4 years of operation include: the development of a Bangla-language OHS curriculum understandable to a limited literacy audience, and which addresses nontraditional OHS hazards such as gender-based harassment and violence; the generation of more than 80 “master trainers” who went on to conduct their own OHS workshops on a community level with 6,495 workers and community residents; increased attention to OHS issues by the participating non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and increased OHS knowledge and skills on their staff and the communities they serve; and increased activity by garment workers in their factory health and safety committees, and “AntiHarassment Committees” (designed to reduce harassment and violence against women workers).