We met with Masonic on Tuesday afternoon to advance your claims for your new enterprise agreement. We talked about a lot of important issues, including uniform provisions, best practice redundancy entitlements, consistent parental leave, evidence required for taking personal leave and reasonable pandemic isolation leave.

While Masonic have not agreed to all our claims, we’ll continue to work to get a deal that you deserve and will seek further feedback from staff on these critical issues.

Disappointingly, Masonic are offering a wage increase of only 1.75%. We know this will not be acceptable to staff with runaway inflation and cost of living pressures. We expect the Fair Work Commission to hand down its minimum wage increase decision in the coming weeks, and we expect this figure to at least 3%. We’ll then take that as a benchmark for future negotiations with Masonic.

We’re scheduled to meet again on 16 June and will be in touch with you before then to talk about how the bargaining is progressing.