Coles will not put a new wage deal agreed on with the shop workers' union to a staff vote until the workplace tribunal decides whether to throw out its existing deal that pays lower penalty rates.
The supermarket and the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association, last week arrived at a draft two-year agreement for Coles' 77,000 retail employees, which would see them paid weekend penalties at the award rate, the basic wages safety net.
The SDA has been embroiled in controversy in the past two years, with Fairfax Media investigations revealing workers at some of the nation's biggest and best-known employers, including Coles, have missed out on millions of dollars a year due to substandard agreements brokered by the union.
Coles was forced to revert to its current workplace agreement last year after the Fair Work Commission found it had been underpaying thousands of employees.
Under the proposed new deal Coles would pay permanent employees the award penalties of a 25 per cent loading on top of the base rate and an additional 10 per cent for shift work on Saturdays, and a 95 per cent loading for regular hours and double time for shift work on Sundays.
The Sunday loading would scale down to 50 per cent by 2020, in line with the Fair Work Commission's ruling on Sunday rates earlier this year.
The deal will need to be voted on by Coles workers, but SDA national secretary Gerard Dwyer said he did not expect that to happen until after the FWC ruled on an appeal to rip up the supermarket's current pay agreement, first agreed on in 2011.
That agreement is being challenged before the workplace tribunal amid concerns that staff are still worse off due to lower night and weekend shifts penalty rates.
Mr Dwyer said the new draft agreement ensured that "all classes of workers will now be paid above the award".
A spokesman for the supermarket said the new deal would pay workers more than the award rate "at all times", and give workers certainty about future wage increases and protections around take-home pay.
The Retail and Fast Food Workers Union's secretary Josh Cullinan said his members would likely vote against the deal, as it traded away too many benefits while creating a two-tiered pay structure between existing and new employees, that could disadvantage existing workers.
"We're delighted that workers are going to be earning at least the award rates that they've been denied for a long time, but this agreement and the cuts that it introduces are not the mechanism to do that," Mr Cullinan said.
