After many months and even a vote before Christmas, we have finally found some middle ground and hopefully resolved the most outstanding issues with your Montagu agreement.

Firstly and probably most importantly, they’ve agreed to keep sleepovers to a maximum of 8 hours. This was a clear area of dispute when they wanted to allow sleepovers to go up for up to 10 hours.

Secondly they have moved on wages and guaranteed a 4% increase this year and 3% the following two years – and you’ll either get that amount or the amount awarded by Fair Work, whichever is greater.

In terms of the other outstanding matters, we reached the following outcomes:

• Progression between pay points to occur every 12 months as long as you have worked 1000 hours in the year – previously they had said 1976 hours (which meant only full-time employees would progress every 12 months)

• Penalty payment for late payment to be 8 hours’ pay per day until you get paid

• Management must consult you if they are moving your work location more than 15km. It had been proposed as 30km.

• The minimum engagement for training will be 2 hours. They’ve agreed to remove a provision allowing the minimum engagement to go less than that.

While this is not perfect, we believe we have reached a reasonable compromise, and your HACSU negotiating team have now given Russel the okay for the agreement to go out to vote.

Montagu have agreed to extend the access period for workers to have two weeks to consider and review the agreement before voting starts. The access period is likely to start later this week.

We’ll update you once we find out more. If you have any questions in the meantime, please call HACSUassist on 1300 880 032.