I think there should be a seal for good employment conditions just as there is for organic. To partake will be entirely voluntary. The trick would be to find a balance between conditions which are far out there and conditions which most companies can claim and hence are not very meaningful.
People need to feel shamed for choosing the lesser option, otherwise nothing significant will happen.
To illustrate: I learned somewhere that clothing from Bangladesh would only have to be a tiny percentage more expensive to double the wages of the workers there. Assuming they got the money. But as it is, no one cares. But if given an option which was easy to identify and to choose and which was a matter of public exposure, that may quickly change.
As with many the products, the history of textiles at Bangladesh is one of every player down to the poor workers trying to squeeze prices. We can say that a factory owner there who set up the factory without any concern for the safety of workers and caused their deaths is a scumbag (was it two years ago that we saw that in the news for a brief time?), but he operates in a "competitive market" where if he didn't do this he might go bankrupt, the big retailers would buy from others.
The problem is structural. Can the end consumers make a change here? A little when there is a scandal, and a few weeks later it's all forgotten. That has been the history of these things so far. I don't believe some label would change it.
Textiles (and this applies also to agricultural goods) have had the retail operations concentrated under control of a few companies. These big retailers will squeeze prices in order not just to increase their margins, but also (and perhaps this is a bigger driver) to defend their market share against their few competitors. It is an oligopoly but one still with competition. The problem is that the retailers are so much bigger than the producers. Producers get squeezed, so they in turn squeeze their workers. You mentioned Bangladesh, but what about the massive use of cheap immigrant labour in european agriculture? If europeans don't even bother to enforce their labour laws in their own territory (and they don't, I see it), if they too squeeze workers and even import cheaper workers, under pressure from the retailers, and with the silent complicity of the state, what hope do you have of controlling working conditions in far away countries?
The problem is structural. A decision was made by many european governments, some three decades ago, to push for concentration of retail business. The technical goal was control of inflation, and that was achieved. But one other consequence of this move was a very strong downward pressure on costs in those sectors where producers were many and the new retailers very few: the power balance was shifted against producers. Unfortunately these industries with many producers happen to be those more labour intensive. The capital intensive ones were already concentrated, think the conglomerates such as Univeler or Johnson, but also got
more concentrated over these years.
So this was the price paid for a deliberate, engineered, government policy to keep retail prices of ordinary consumer goods low. It's not just "the market", it was s specific set of market rules pushed by governments starting in the 70s. An environment was created where the big retailers had a competitive advantage. They were allowed to report their profits in "tax heavens", this having bigger dividends and attracting capital for expansion. They were allowed to buy worldwide unencumbered by tariffs (thus pitting local produces against producers from across the world, something that big retailers are better at because there are economies of scale in long-distance logistics. They were, in several countries, exempt from laws that had been put in place to regulate commerce for decades (operating hours, use of overtime from workers, etc). There were political options. Those options remain in force, and their effects won't be changed by some tweaks such as labels for consumers. To change the effects you need to change
the structure of these businesses. You'd have to swing negotiating power back to the producers.
