After the death toll from the factory collapse in Bangladesh soared past 1,100, H&M announced today that it has signed a fire and building safety agreement in the country, Reuters reports. The agreement was initiated by IndustryALL and UNI Global Union. The company said in a statement that it hopes for “a broad coalition of signatures in order for the agreement to work effectively on the ground.” The company didn’t use any of the suppliers that were operating out of the collapsed factory.

In the wake of the tragedy, the country has also announced that it plans to raise the minimum wage for garment workers, the Associated Press reports:

A new minimum wage board will issue recommendations for pay raises within three months, Textiles Minister Abdul Latif Siddiky said Sunday. The Cabinet will then decide whether to accept those proposals.

The wage board will include representatives of factory owners, workers and the government, he said.

The garment industry’s minimum wage was last raised in 2010 by 80 percent following protests from workers, rising to 3,000 takas, or $38, a month.

Working conditions in the country have long been dismal thanks to the corruption of government officials, a failure to commit to higher standards from companies in the industry, and a glut of workers desperate to work. After a fire that killed 112 workers in November, major retailers refused to implement a union-proposed safety plan, citing costs. That may now change following the leadership of H&M.

American demand for cheap clothing has also fueled the garment industry boom in Bangladesh without ensuring better working conditions. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “Americans last year devoted just 3% of their annual spending to clothing and footwear, compared with around 7% in 1970 and about 13% in 1945, according to Commerce Department data.” Spending has decreased in part because clothing prices have fallen over the last two decades after rising from the 1950s to the 1970s. Prices for clothing have risen just 10 percent since 1889, while food prices, in contrast, have gone up more than 80 percent.

But the cost of safety may not even be noticeable to many consumers. The price tag for safety upgrades in the country’s factories, if passed on entirely to the consumer, could cost as little as 10 cents per garment. Companies may also be able to absorb a minimum wage increase as they did when cotton prices rose in 2011.

If you did nothing but watch cable news for the last two days, you would have no idea that hundreds of fast food workers in the midwest are on strike — walking out of their jobs, protesting outside of the storefronts, calling on employers to end the horrendously low wages that have left many workers in poverty.

Since Wednesday, when the strikes began, neither CNN nor Fox News has even mentioned the fast food worker protests, according to a quick search of media monitoring site TV Eyes. MSNBC has discussed the strikes once, during a segment of All In With Chris Hayes.

It’s not that the channels haven’t discussed economic issues: For comparison’s sake, in the same time period, CNN mentioned the Dow on eight separate occasions, MSNBC on 23, and Fox News on 14. They have also managed to have dozens of discussions about fast food — particularly McDonald’s. But all were in reference to what Charles Murray — one of the men who rescued three kidnapped women in Ohio — was eating before his heroic act.

Cable news often fails to cover economic news as it relates to people’s lives. Every station was equally abysmal at discussing job-threatening sequestration cuts, though they spent a lot of time focusing on lines at airports or the discontinuation of White House tours.

But the workers’ strike is certainly worth the time of all three major cable channels. Currently, those hundreds of workers on strike don’t make a living wage and lack any union representation that would help them collectively bargain. Even as the profits of the companies they work for rise, workers’ wages have stagnated. The fight is also happening at the federal level; in his State of the Union, President Obama called on Congress to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour. That puts it just at 1981 levels, accounting for inflation.

One World Trade Center, which will replace the World Trade Center towers that fell in the September 11 terrorist attacks, became the tallest building in the United States this morning when workers hoisted a 408-foot spire atop it. At 1,776 feet tall, the building is now the tallest in the United States and the third-tallest in the world.

And, as American Rights at Work noted when it became the tallest building in New York, it was built with union labor:

It’s fitting: union members were among the first responders; union members served in the immediate cleanup; and now union members are part of the rebuilding.

Anti-union legislation has made its way across America in recent years, from Michigan to Indiana to Wisconsin. But unions were instrumental in building America’s middle class, in responding to the attacks on 9/11, and now, in rebuilding the World Trade Center in the decade since the attacks.

“It’s a pretty awesome feeling,” project manager Juan Estevez told the Associated Press. “It’s a culmination of a tremendous amount of team work … rebuilding the New York City skyline once again.”

A new AFL-CIO analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 4,693 workers were killed on the job in 2011, an average of 13 workers every day. That’s more than the number of pedestrians struck and killed by cars every year and more than the lives lost during the entire Iraq War. This is the third year that the fatality rate for workers has been unchanged after years of decline.

Another estimated 50,000 died from diseases contracted on the job. Overall, workers reported 6.8 million job-related injuries and illnesses.

The report also notes that the cost of injuries and illnesses that occur on the job is huge. One study put the figure at $250 billion annually due to medical costs and the loss in productivity, more than the cost of cancer.

These numbers come after a fertilizer plant in West, Texas exploded, killing 15 and injuring hundreds. The plant hadn’t been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the agency tasked with ensuring workplace safety, since 1985. In fact, the Government Accountability Office recently found that the average workplace only gets a visit from OSHA inspectors every 99 years.

That number may get even worse, as OSHA can expect a big cut from sequestration. It will have to slash its budget by 8.2 percent, which could mean 1,200 fewer workplace inspections. Meanwhile, Republican budgets have sought to reduce its budget by $99 million and cut other workplace protection agencies.

Bangladesh’s $20 billion garment industry makes it the world’s second-largest apparel exporter, and the United States is its second-largest buyer after Europe. With the factory collapse death toll now over 800, American consumers may be looking to buy clothes that weren’t made in such working conditions. It is likely much better for the Bangladeshi economy and its garment workers for companies to invest in upgrades rather than flee the country, and those investments could cost consumers a mere 10 cents per garment. But in the meantime, there are some places for American shoppers to turn.

Finding these retailers can be difficult, given how much American companies rely on Bangladeshi manufacturers, but some have either taken steps to ensure better working conditions or simply manufacture their clothing elsewhere. Below are some of those retailers, although the list is far from comprehensive. Help ThinkProgress build this list: Where do you buy clothing that is sourced from humane working conditions? Leave your suggestions in the comments and we will update the post.

Levi Strauss & Co.
Sells: Full range of men’s and women’s apparel
Levi Strauss & Co. claims to be the first multinational apparel company to establish a code of conduct for its suppliers in 1991. Its Terms of Engagement outlines rules for child and forced labor, working hours and wages, freedom of association, and detailed safety requirements. While it still sources from factories in Bangladesh, it doesn’t use multistory facilities that have factories with different owners, and in the past it has taken action to police the standards in its facilities. When it found that two factories in Bangladesh employed child workers, it decided to keep paying the workers while they attended school and offer them full-time jobs once they were of legal working age rather than fire them.

Patagonia
Sells: Outdoor apparel and gear
While it has factories in Bangladesh, it has eight in the U.S. and a Code of Conduct for its suppliers that expressly prohibits unsafe working conditions, child labor, and excessive hours and encourages higher wages and unionization.

Land’s End
Sells: Jeans, shirts, and sweatpants as well as home and pet items
Land’s End launched a “Made in the U.S.A.” collection in 2012 with its Durable Goods line. The line offers clothing, home, pet, and specialty items.

Brooks Brothers
Sells: Men’s dress clothes
Brooks Brothers has a clothing line of men’s dress shirts, suits, ties, and dress shoes that are made in the United States. The company also has a commitment to philanthropic spending and partners with non-profit organizations related to health issues, education, and the arts.

New Balance
Sells: Sneakers and sportswear
New Balance has a line of sneakers either made in the U.S. or assembled here.

American Giant
Sells: Men’s sweatshirts, T-shirts, and sweatpants
Seeking to address the fact that “most clothes we love…are made in countries that are so far away, the only American job it created was a store clerk,” the company sources its materials and manufacturing in the U.S.

Alta Gracia
Sells: College apparel
Alta Gracia’s products are made in the Dominican Republic, where it says it pays a living wage, sometimes “more than three times the minimum wage,” respects the right to form a union, and ensures a safe workplace. The Worker Rights Consortium ensures that the company is compliant with these standards through on-the-ground monitoring.

Flint and Tinder
Sells: Men’s underwear and accessories
The company manufactures all of its products in the U.S. in its own facilities, which started with a single factory and has expanded to a larger group. It says that for every 1,000 pair of underwear it sells in a month, it adds at least one job in its supply chain.

The factory collapse in Bangladesh has now claimed upward of 700 lives, making it the worst industrial disaster in Bangladesh and the most deadly one in the history of the garment industry. As has been widely reported, workers were hesitant to enter the building on the day of the collapse due to visible cracks in the building.

Since the disaster, many have urged large retail corporations to upgrade the working conditions in the factories from which they source their products. Three hundred large companies had previously refused to sign a pledge to do so before the collapse, citing costs. The need for low prices and fast production is driven in large part by American demand for cheap clothing. So how much would clothing prices rise for the average consumer if all of the costs of upgrading Bangladesh factories were passed on to them?

According to an estimate provided by the Worker Rights Consortium, it could be as little as 10 cents per article of clothing. The group comes to this figure by estimating that building renovation, safety equipment installation, and other related costs would come to about $3 billion, which is says is a high estimate that assumes virtually all factory buildings need major renovations, as some may not. Spreading that cost over five years, it comes to $600 million each year, and tacking 10 cents on to each of the roughly 7 billion garments exported from the country each year would easily cover that cost. After the initial investment in renovations, the group says the costs of maintenance will drop significantly.

Even without these large-scale renovations, there are precautions that could be taken immediately that would cost little. As Kimberly Ann Elliott, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and an expert in international trade policy, told Dylan Matthews of Wonkblog, factories could install fire extinguishers, unlock doors, and take other measures that don’t add much to costs but improve workers’ safety.

But it may not be as simple as companies investing more in building renovations and fire extinguishers. As Pietra Rivoli, a professor of international business at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told ThinkProgress, one of the biggest barriers to safe working conditions is a political infrastructure in Bangladesh that can properly monitor workers and their employers. “In the U.S. we have things like building codes and occupancy permits,” she pointed out. “What’s missing in Bangladesh is that local political infrastructure.” There is also a problem with widespread political corruption. It may therefore be difficult for large corporations to substitute for regulatory bodies.

The response from many large retailers so far has been to pull production from the country altogether. The Walt Disney Company has already announced that it will end production in Bangladesh, and other retailers may follow suit. That could devastate the country’s economy and make life even more difficult for its garment workers. Other Western retailers have indicated that they will instead invest in operations in Bangladesh and look at new plans for factory safety, but so far most of the money pledged will be for relief efforts and few have committed to upgrading factories or tougher inspections.

On Tuesday, both houses of Hawaii’s state legislature passed a bill that grants domestic workers basic labor rights:

The bill passed the House and Senate on Tuesday with little opposition in the heavily Democratic chambers. It covers cooks, waiters, butlers, housekeepers and other workers, including babysitters in some cases.

The bill makes it illegal to discriminate against anyone employed as a domestic worker based on race, gender, sexual orientation and other factors.

The bill also brings them under the protection of the state’s wage and hour laws. It now heads to Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s (D) desk. If he signs it into law, Hawaii will join New York as the only two states with laws on the books to grant domestic workers basic worker protections. The Illinois Senate’s labor committee is also set to vote on the state’s proposed bill of rights this week, and California, Massachusetts, Oregon, Texas, and Ohio are expected to consider similar measures soon.

Domestic workers inhabit a booming industry, but one that offers little pay and is rife with abuse. A survey by the National Domestic Workers Alliance found that 20 percent of housekeepers and nearly a third of nannies and caregivers make less than the minimum wage. In fact, nearly three-quarters of the domestic workforce is paid less than $13 an hour. Forty percent of nannies and caregivers work more than 40 hours, yet 85 percent aren’t guaranteed overtime pay. About 20 percent of domestic workers report being threatened, insulted, or verbally abused by their employers, a figure that rises to 36 percent for live-in workers, yet they have little recourse to report and address abuse.

New York’s Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights addressed all of these issues by affirming the right to be paid a minimum wage and granting the right to overtime pay at time-and-a-half over 40 hours, protection for workers who suffer sexual or racial harassment, and earned paid days off.

The number of North Carolinians who died at work in 2012 is likely more than three times the original number reported by the state Labor Department. While the state estimated 35 worker fatalities last year, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH) put the number at 150.

Released in the wake of the deadly Texas fertilizer plant explosion enabled by massive regulatory failure on the state and federal levels, COSH’s report holds North Carolina’s weak workplace regulations accountable for these 150 deaths. While the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration covers workplace safety in about half the states, North Carolina uses a far more lenient state program.

In one of the highlighted cases, 39-year-old Luis Martinez died in a trench cave-in while installing a water line at NC State University. The trench cave-in could have been prevented with the use of proper equipment like a trench box that supports the sides. Yet the state essentially ignored repeated violations by Martinez’s employer for years before his death:

• August 22, 2007: As part of a planned inspection, NC OSHA finds that J.F. Wilkerson has violated trench safety standards and assesses a fine of $1,175. But the penalty is reduced to zero as part of an “informal settlement” with the company.

• November 14, 2007: After a worker files a complaint of unsafe conditions on the company’s jobsite, NC OSHA investigates and finds five serious violations. The company is fined $7,920 but the penalty is reduced to a paltry $1,820.

• February 23, 2011: Another worker files a complaint of unsafe conditions on a J.F. Wilkerson jobsite. NC OSHA inspects but does not cite the company for any violations.

• November 19, 2012: Unsafe conditions persist at the worksite and Luis Martinez is killed. NC OSHA’s investigation is still in process.

NC OSHA’s fines for companies that violate workplace safety standards are far lower than federal penalties. Repeat offenders pay just $1,906 in North Carolina, while they would pay $7,487 in a state covered by federal OSHA.

While the federal agency’s protections are generally stronger than state programs, so-called “pro-business” lawmakers have worked hard to hobble OSHA. The agency is already desperately underfunded and so over-extended that many workplaces have avoided inspection for nearly a century. As sequestration cuts are implemented, OSHA will lose another $564.8 million and will likely cut 1,200 workplace inspections.

Even without budget cuts, OSHA’s existing protections have already fallen short. COSH also released a national report on worker fatalities estimating that 13 Americans die at work every day, while countless others contract serious illnesses from exposure to harmful chemicals or excessive heat. Immigrant workers have the highest rate of deaths, as employers routinely threaten them with deportation if they speak out against the dangerous conditions. However, the Texas fertilizer plant explosion seems to have served as a wake-up call for many Americans. A majority now support tougher enforcement of existing regulations, while 44 percent believe current workplace safety regulations are not strict enough.

The recently reintroduced Protecting America’s Workers Act is one attempt to remedy the dangerously wide loopholes in existing workplace safety standards. The bill would bolster OSHA’s reporting, inspection and enforcement practices, expand federal protections to state, county, municipal and U.S. government employees, and increase whistleblower protections.