Weekends wrangle for banks

Most ANZ and National Bank branches will be shut during stopwork meetings this morning, says the bank workers' union.

Thousands of staff will walk off the job at 8.30am in response to a move by the merged ANZ-National Bank that devalues workers' weekends, says the Finsec union.

The ANZ staff are paid time-and-a-half for working weekends, but the bank does not want to pay the extra rates to new staff or National Bank staff, a union spokeswoman says.

The bank said staff could choose to work weekends and have two weekdays off.