THE Workplace Relations Minister, Bill Shorten, has invited the big banks to sit down with the government to discuss award rate changes but promised to protect low-paid workers from a ”wage cut by stealth” from banks that were making record profits.

Mr Shorten was responding to a submission from major banks to a review of award rates in which they call for the definition of ordinary hours to be extended to include Saturday and Sunday in a bid to ”promote flexible and efficient modern work practice”.

Mr Shorten said he would be pleased to meet the chief executives, as well as the Finance Sector Union, to discuss why they want to extend ordinary hours to weekends and the consequence that would have on workers.

”If they just want to use the ordinary time extension, which was traditionally just Monday and Friday, and extend it to seven days a week … absent any other proposition to compensate people, this is a wage cut in stealth,” he said.

”And this is not a wage cut for the CEOs on several million dollars a year, this is potentially a wage cut for people – part-time workers, women workers, people who earn $40,000-$50,000 a year.

”The government cannot just stand by and hear large banks making very, very large profits and just simply acquiesce to their demand that people, low-paid workers, take a cut in their penalty rates on the weekends just to satisfy an unargued case.

”I just don’t accept the view of the world which says that productivity is gained by the CEO and the company making more profits and the employee having their pay cut.”

The Commonwealth Bank said it supported the extension of ordinary hours because it recognised employees in banks, building societies and credit unions already worked at weekends as part of their regular schedule and the change would reflect that reality.

”We have made no application to change penalty rates in the industry award and, even if we had, those changes would have absolutely no impact on the penalty rates paid to Commonwealth Bank employees,” a spokesman said.

The Coalition declined to comment other than to say the review should be allowed to run its course.

The Greens workplace spokesman, Adam Bandt, said banks were making record profits and that staff who worked at the weekend were entitled to fair penalty rates.

”The Greens accept that we’re in a seven-day economy, but weekends still remain the time for family, friends, sport and other social activities. People who work on weekends should be properly remunerated,” he said.

The Finance Sector Union national secretary, Leon Carter, yesterday said the banks’ push was a precursor to cutting the pay of low-paid finance workers.

Retail groups said it was inevitable that banks, like many other sectors of the economy, would look to employ more staff at weekends, as the working week changed from Monday to Friday to seven days.

Russell Zimmerman, the executive director of the Australian Retailers Association, said it was inevitable the banks were coming under the same cost pressures other retailers had – because they were now running their outlets on Saturdays and in some cases on Sundays.

He said the answer to these cost pressures was, ultimately, the removal of penalty rates altogether for all sectors needing weekend workers. The association has recently pushed for a halving of the penalty rate on Sundays for retail workers, so that it is, like Saturday, time-and-a-half rather than double time.

with Clay Lucas