These are not things that individual employees can work their way up to achieve.
Suppose there are two factories: one with a worse safety record, and one with a better one. When someone comes from the farm, they find the first factory has an opening; after a few years, they have enough experience that they move to the second factory.
I don't know how much spread there is in factory conditions (but I imagine there must be some), but I do know there's at least some spread in worker ability / training.
These are things that will only change from the top.
Suppose you offered the workers of a sweatshop either an air conditioning system for their workplace or the money it would cost, split among them. Do you think that vote would be unanimous?
Lately I've been thinking about all of the various services and products I consume and how pretty much all of them are bad for the world in one way or another, large or small. Some of the problems associated with them I am less concerned about. Some of them could be construed as good things (i.e. sweat shop labor DOES provide jobs, whatever impact it might or might not have on the overall quality of life).
In general I'd like to live my life having as minimal a negative impact on the world as possible. But "negative impact" is a hugely broad topic and there are a million variables to consider and I just don't have time.
The best solution, I think, would be to have a wikipedia-like website where individual people with knowledge of specific problems can start tagging specific products with the types of negative consequences associated with them, and (somehow) sort those consequences into categories that individuals can decide how much to worry about. Over time it could eventually become a fairly efficient way to track the utility value of things.
I'm sort of hoping something like this already exists, even if in an infant form, and that someone here knows about it. But I doubt it, so the I guess this falls mostly under the post category of "hey someone other than me should devote a bunch of time and energy to this project that I myself am not qualified to do." But maybe a few people here at least have a better idea than I do of the scope of the requirements for it, so the idea can be refined a bit.