Going Further | Below are three additional activities you can do with your class related to the recent disasters in Bangladeshi garment factories:

1. Taking Personal Responsibility. Alecia Simmonds, a law school lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Australia, felt a very personal response to the Bangladesh factory collapse. She checked the labels of the clothes lying in her bedroom. “My floor was littered with dresses and T-shirts that had been run through the sewing machines of people working in prison conditions or even possibly now dead,” she wrote in an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Consider the lessons Ms. Simmonds reaches about her own role as a consumer. Do you agree with her conclusions about what consumers must do to prevent future factory disasters? Write your own personal response to the Bangladesh building collapse, or to Ms. Simmonds’s article, proposing your own set of lessons to guide consumer behavior.

2. Child Labor. Do children still work in dangerous jobs in America or other countries, despite laws and treaties designed to protect them? Research coverage on child labor issues in the archives of The New York Times, and design a world map highlighting recent incidents. Then design an action plan to publicize or challenge recent examples of child labor that you find particularly troubling. Hold a school competition to see which student or class can design and implement the most effective effort to publicize and challenge illegal child labor.

3. Jobs Versus Safety. In 2009, pressure by workers’ rights and environmental groups nearly shut down the dangerous ship-breaking industry in Bangladesh. But after local business owners pressured the government, the industry came back to life and continues to compete with countries like India for the lucrative scrap metal trade. (Last year the Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker that ran aground in Alaska in 1989 and caused widespread oil pollution, was sent to a ship-breaking yard in Gujarat, India.)

Critics say ship-breakers in Bangladeshdangerous working conditions and lax environmental standards, and a proposal by the European Union would ban its ships from being recycled under such conditions. Can such regulations work, or will companies continue to seek unregulated shores to break up their ships at the lowest possible cost? Consider the evidence and then formulate a policy paper designed to ensure that ships from all nations are recycled in a safe manner.