Auckland bus drivers are ropeable over a lack of consultation on new, more demanding rosters.

NZ Bus staff will today protest a roster shakeup which will see some facing different start times, weekend work, and lengthy broken shifts.

FIRST Union delegate Phil Morgan said it stems from Auckland Transport's requests for more frequent services, which has upped the company's workload.

He said NZ Bus workers have always been able to apply for better hours the longer they work there.

However, the company says the proposed changes give fairness for all.

Mr Morgan said the ethnic mix of drivers in Auckland is changing, with a lot more recent immigrants starting to come into the fold.

"They want to drive buses and they want to earn money. So they're prepared to do the longer shifts."

The age demographic of drivers is also shifting.

"I'm a man who's in his early 60s; that used to be the guise of the bus driver, it's no longer that way.

"You're getting a lot of young family people who need to earn money to drive their families forward. So these people are prepared to work."

But NZ Bus is changing shifts right across the roster spectrum.

Mr Morgan said under the new rosters, some drivers will be forced to work every Saturday and Sunday for up to a month, with mid-week days off.

"Now of course the family's off at school, wife's away at work .... there's no family life in that, you sit at home by yourself."

Phil Morgan is calling for 'lifestyle rosters' which provide a work-life balance and won't lead to driver fatigue - something he says will put drivers and passengers at risk.

But attempts to introduce such rosters have been swept aside by NZ Bus.

Phil Morgan said the company rode roughshod over recent consultations, not allowing union members to have their say.

Last year, he was involved in a major roster rewrite which took three months.

"We started looking at lifestyle rostering and how that could best be placed in the depots, to give drivers a better work-life balance.

"What we worked on was put forward, our roster rewrite was accepted by the company."

He said the template was accepted as the way forward for any roster rewrite, including by NZ Bus's Chief Operating Officer.

"So you can imagine our surprise when they come to us a couple of weeks ago and say 'We've got these new rosters and we've got to put them out because AT have asked for some timing changes in the runs'."

Putting it bluntly, Phil Morgan said there was no consultation on this latest rewrite to cater to Auckland Transport's request for more frequent services on some routes.

He said delegates were given three days to talk to every driver in the North Shore, City and Panmure NZ Bus depots, get feedback, and formulate a response.

"The anger in the drivers' room was palpable, because they posted these rosters straight away (before consultation) and (the drivers) just went off the deep end over it.

The delegate gathered information but said there was no way to form that into a reasonable reply by the Friday deadline, so a decision was made to present a response from workers at the following Monday's meeting.

Phil Morgan said "that of course to the normal person would seem quite reasonable. But not NZ Bus.

"We went to the meeting on Monday and we were promptly told because we didn't have the consultation papers in by Friday that they weren't going to talk about what we'd prepared.

"They'd just disregard that and carry on with the rosters as they saw fit."

Long serving drivers have been on set AM or PM rosters over a long period of time.

"And all of a sudden the company decided that was no good, it was going to upset their cicadaen rhythms."

Mr Morgan said those workers on broken shifts (with two split over the course of the day), are now being put on night work on the weekends as well.

"So you've got drivers who are working all week. And because of the break of up to four hours during the day, if you live further away from the depot...you have to sit down at the depot for that time.

"You don't get paid, or you get a small allowance, and then you go back out and do your second half. So you could be there up to 13, 14 hours.

"So you do that during the week, and on the weekend you're going to be doing a PM duty.

"So where's the work-life balance, where's the family time?"

"What they're saying is fair, is not fair. We can show them fair."