Garment workers in Bangladesh are poised to receive a 50 to 80 percent increase in the minimum wage following massive protests in September which closed more than 100 factories and caused a 20 percent decline in national production, according to a Reuters report citing the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association.

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The minimum wage has been increased. You know, it was last increased around 2010. And right now workers have been calling for a more than doubling of the minimum wage, to about $100 a month U.S. dollars. And while that may seem incredibly small to people over here, it would be more than a doubling of the current minimum wage, which should tell you just how incredibly hard it is to survive on these wages in that industry. And there may be a meaningful wage increase this time around, but the strikes and the protests are likely to continue, because it'll likely still be less than what the workers are demanding right now.

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For the first time, you have the emergence of this thing called the safety accord, which is sort of a comprehensive agreement to set up safety standards for fire and building safety in Bangladesh that would lock international corporations into some sort of regulatory oversight system with independent auditors rather than the sort of, you know, in-house corporate inspectors that they have now, and it would allow for some sort of accountability. There would be involvement from local unions, as well as international labor bodies, to provide oversight. And you've seen a number of European brands sign up for this. I think they just reached their 100 brand milestone last week. So they've gotten, you know, scores of brands to sign up.

The two notable holdouts, of course, are Walmart and GAP, which are two of the largest names in cheap fashion in the U.S. The fact that they are holding out, they are refusing to comply with the system, really shows what outliers these U.S. industry leaders are. They're currently trying to sort of reinvent the wheel and create their own sort of safety accord that would obviously offer a lot less accountability for the corporations.