All this horrible news about crumbling factories in Bangladesh has me thinking: why can’t more companies be like Patagonia? Last fall I had the honor of interviewing Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard for Inc Magazine. He is old school in the best possible way: he does not email and only recently got a cell phone after he found himself stranded at an airport and discovered pay phones are obsolete. But he also believes things should last and that people would prefer to pay a little more for high quality products that don’t hurt anyone or anything in their making. One of my favorite quotes from that story was, “Every time I made the right decision for the planet, I made money.” Chouinard sees himself as a steward of our planet, and its people too. And he firmly believes it makes good business sense. This is why he is pushing for more companies to adhere to a consumer sustainability index where, “you’ll be able to look at a pair of jeans in a department store and see a grade on them which includes its carbon footprint and the factory’s working conditions.” He has always believed in full transparency: check out the Footprint Chronicles if you want to know how many gallons of water it took to make one t-shirt. Or how many women worked at the factory where your sweater was made. And before you buy that next pair of jeans, check to see if the company that made them is a member of The Fair Labor Organization or is committed to Sustainable Practices. Imagine if EVERY apparel company was this transparent? Last count, 800 people died in the Bangladesh collapse: its not just the building owner with blood on his hands, but the companies that chose to work with him, and the customers who go for price over quality. Not only of the product itself, but of the lives making those products, too.

Does your company have a domestic violence policy on its books? Likely not. And yet it is, like sexual harassment was in the seventies, a dark secret of every American workplace. I not only spoke with the leading experts in the field–special thanks to Kim Wells at Corporate Alliance to End Partner Violence, Maya Raghu of Futures Without Violence who helped launch Workplacesrespond.org and Pam Paziotopolous, a former prosecutor who now consults with companies about how to protect ourselves and our workplaces from this specific kind of violence, I spoke to women who lost loved ones to it.

Kathy Batista was getting her hair done at a salon in Casslebury, Florida when her mother, Gladys Cabrera, was shot dead only a few feet from her. Neither woman knew the gunman. Deb Kenny lost her 26-year-old daughter, Jessica to this sickness when Jessica’s ex of more than four years showed up at the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas, where Jess worked as a concierge, and shot her and then himself one busy Friday evening. And Tami Gemmell lost three of her employees–and friends–when a gunman showed up at her busy salon in Brookfield, Wisconsin on a Sunday afternoon, enraged that Zina Haughton,his wife of 15 years had taken out a restraining order against him. She finally found the courage to leave: He killed her and two colleagues, and then after a stand off with the police, took his own life. This madness must stop. I have written many stories on the issue, but this is the first that made me feel like we can make a nationwide change: if your employer does not have a domestic violence policy, ask that one be created. Today.

We’re a country of people who never stop eating. The freedom to eat anytime and anywhere is convenient, but it also means you may be mindlessly inhaling hundreds of extra calories without even realizing it.