"Bangladeshi workers pay the price when Australian fashion brands collapse", 17 June 2025

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The collapse of Mosaic Brands also impacts a network of approximately 23 Bangladeshi suppliers, who are owed as much as US$15 million. Since Mosaic sales contracts dictate 120-day payment terms — double what sustainable industry initiatives recommend — the majority of this debt is for work completed and delivered months prior to the collapse. If the US$15 million debt goes unpaid, Bangladeshi suppliers will need to shut down factories, leaving thousands of already vulnerable workers at higher risks of poverty, exploitation and modern slavery...

Mosaic...published its Living Wage Roadmap in 2021, with the first step of verifying a living wage benchmark requiring two years, despite this standard already being well-established...By 2024, Mosaic had hoped to engage in open dialogue with its suppliers.

This painfully slow timeline is characteristic of the retailer group’s dismal progress on mitigating modern slavery. Since 2020, Mosaic has published mandatory modern slavery statements under Australia’s Modern Slavery Act (MSA)...

Mosaic’s FY2023 Modern Slavery Statement describes the risk of modern slavery in Bangladesh as low, justifying this on the basis that Bangladesh is an International Accord country and Mosaic is an Accord signatory.

This argument misconstrues health and safety indicators as reliable modern slavery mitigators — unlike, for example, paying a living wage. Mosaic also justified this rating because its team visited supplier factories, a paternalistic example of Global North companies assuming they — rather than the workers themselves or union representatives — are qualified to approve of garment worker working conditions.

While Mosaic’s modern slavery statement...largely failed to reflect on how brand practices contribute to modern slavery risks. Mosaic’s decisions to keep 120-day payment terms and continue to place orders while invoices went unpaid indicate a significant failure to recognise how its practices might exacerbate exploitative conditions.

...most Australian-based fashion brands regulated under the MSA [demonstrate] a propensity to ignore how their own practices contribute to the risk of modern slavery. This highlights the foreseeable conclusion that, as the oversaturated Australian fashion market squeezes out redundant companies, garment workers in the Global South will ultimately pay the price...

MSA’s impact proves that voluntary corporate efforts alone are insufficient in stemming this unsustainable model. Mandatory due diligence is necessary to ensure that brands and retailers are not only held accountable for the harm they cause, but responsible for mitigating future risks to people and the environment.

...industry initiatives such as the Sustainable Terms of Trade Initiative have called on fashion brands to improve their purchasing practices by shortening payment terms, agreeing to penalties for late payments and aligning order scheduling with supplier needs...

One proposal is the establishment of an industry-funded trust fund for garment workers in Australian supply chains to collectively finance worker training, living wages and remediation costs...